Waxing Gibbous Moon - 7 October 2019

The waxing gibbous moon as seen from my front garden in Tyldesley. Waxing means that it's getting bigger. Gibbous refers to the shape, which is less than the full circle of a full moon, but larger than the semicircle shape of the moon at third quarter.

   

Shooting for the Stars!

I've been interested in taking photographs of the night sky for a few years now, but other than taking a few shots of the sun and moon on various eclipses and at other notable times, I've never got my act together to shoot for the stars. Having seen a number of Milky Way photographs coming out of North Wales this year, I decided it was time to try to get some myself.

So after I'd spent the day in Snowdonia with Pete Lawless, I decided that I'd stay on and try for some Milky Way shots myself. The original idea was to meet up with the two most prolific night sky photographers in the area, but somehow the plans went awry and I was contacted on what proved to be an excellent night for photography.

So I was left to my own devices and I ended up revisiting a place that Pete and I had been to during the day to do some landscape shots - Cwm Idwal. I decided on this as I had already familiarised myself with the landscape and footpaths and this was going to be very useful as I wandered around in the dark.

I'd prepared reasonably well by packing a couple of torches and warm clothing and I'd recently bought the PhotoPills app for my phone which helped to show where the Milky Way would be in the sky and at what time. I'd also be practicing taking photos in the back garden to get familiar with my camera controls when you can't really see your hands in front of your face.

Surprisingly though, it wasn't quite as dark as I'd expected because there were some lights in the nearby cottages and the odd car passed by on the A5 road below me. But what really opened my eyes as I stood on the bridge looking over the Afon Ogwen Falls, was the number of people who were wandering about in the dark at 11pm at night! There were headlamps camping on top of Pen yr Ole Wen and Tryfan, lights coming down the steep slopes of both mountains and people going up to Cwm Idwal to wild camp overnight.

So at the end of a very long day, I went back to the car hoping to find a pub on the way home as I was starving and desperate for a pint of lager shandy. But I'd left it too late and all I could find was a Tesco Express which I just managed to get in before closing. I bought two drinks and a sandwich and drove home hoping that some of the shots would be half decent. A great day out and it was quite an experience, believe me.

Partial Lunar Eclipse - 17 July 2019

I knew there was going to be a partial lunar eclipse tonight, but I wasn't going to bother taking any photographs because the moon was very low in the sky and I couldn't see it from my back garden. I found this strange because yesterday it had been a very clear and bright full moon for much of my late night journey home from Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire.

But just before going to bed I thought I'd have one last look from the front of my house and there it was, glowing orangey-red in the sky and rapidly getting smaller. All plans of going to bed were quickly abandoned and I went for my camera, tripod and cable release.

After a couple of minutes of taking a range of shots I settled on an ISO, aperture and shutter speed that seemed to work OK. But although the moon started off quite clear and bright, it was getting smaller as the Earth's shadow on it grew and clouds were starting to appear too. All this made it very difficult to focus and get a clear shot. These shots don't have the clarity and detail of shots I've taken on clear winter's nights, but they do show the progression of the eclipse quite nicely.

I've never really mastered the art of taking photographs of the moon or night sky and everything becomes a matter of trial and error, which means taking loads of shots on different settings. I set up at the front of my house where anyone in the street could see me and although not many people or cars went past, but I'm sure those that did were thinking, 'What's this nutter doing?'.

The last shot shows that the moon was indeed almost full and that the Earth cast a shadow on it as it rotated. So there you have it, the final lunar eclipse of 2019 as seen from Tyldesley in Greater Manchester.

Spring Equinox - the Last Supermoon of 2019

Having failed miserably to get an acceptable photo of Astley Green Colliery with the Supermoon in the background tonight, I've had to settle for just the moon on its own. Moonshots always look better with some foreground interest, like a building, mountain or E.T. riding a bike and full moons tend to look rather flat not having as much contrast as partial moons as there are no shadows.

But hey-ho, it's the last Supermoon of 2019 (there have been two others already) and it's on the spring equinox. The combination of these two events won't happen again for another 11 years.

'A supermoon is a full moon that has reached the closest point to Earth in its monthly elliptical orbit around the planet. As such, supermoons can appear to be larger and brighter in the night sky.'

'March’s full moon is sometimes called the “worm moon,” because according to folklore tradition, it occurs at a time when the frosty ground is melting and earthworms start to emerge.'

Ain't the internet a wonderful thing!

Supermoon in Tyldesley

It's 'Supermoon' time again, and this one is really special as it's a 'Super Blue Blood Moon' according to the experts in astronomy. The phenomenon hasn't been seen in Europe for over 36 years and so it would be rude not to at least try to get a photograph of it. This is first shot that I took from my back garden in Tyldesley, Greater Manchester.

'Supermoon' is the name for a full moon when it's at the closest point in its orbit around the Earth. This makes it appear up to 14 percent brighter and 30 percent larger than normal. A 'Blue Moon' occurs when there is a second full moon in a calendar month. The blue moon isn't actually blue at all, it's just the name give to the second full moon.

The term 'Blood Moon' comes from the rusty red appearance during a total lunar eclipse, when the moon is in the Earth’s shadow. The colour is caused by blue light scattering as the sun’s rays refract through the Earth’s atmosphere. In the UK this was only visible for about 10 minutes after moonrise.

I decided that I needed a local landmark to put in the foreground of the shot to make it more interesting, but exposing for the moon and the foreground is very difficult without filters or multiple shots. So I just settled for an atmospheric shot of the moon over Astley Green Colliery, which is just down the road from where I live.

As you can see from the above photo, there was a lot of cloud about in Tyldesley, and I only had a few moments when the full moon actually appeared. Even then it was still quite hazy when I took this photograph of the full moon itself in a slightly longer clear spell later on in the evening.

Unfortunately cloudy skies limited what we could see here in the North West of England, but just as I was closing my bedroom curtains and going to bed, I noticed that the whole of my back garden was being lit up by the moon. So I dashed downstairs and went outside my front door to take this last shot. It was absolutely freezing!

Being after midnight actually made it February 1st, but it was still the same night and full moon!

Here's a link to video made by Michael Tomas in London where he had an incredible view of the 'Super Blue Blood Moon' against the London skyline. In the video Michael explains how he planned and took his incredible shots.

Click this link to read a transcript of Michael's video and some amazing still photographs.

Full Moon - 12 January 2017

I got one shot at tonight's full moon before it was covered in clouds. When the sun, moon and earth all line up at full moon then we get the highest (and indeed lowest) tides which are called 'spring' tides (nothing to do with the time of year!). In fact it takes a bit of time for the enormous mass of water to move, so the spring tide will actually occur a couple of days after the full moon.

Birders are always very keen to know about the current phase of the moon, because some of the best shoreline birding is done on high tides because they force wading and other birds to roost closer to the land. Where there are salt marshes, the land creatures that inhabit them are also forced to move further inland and this can often produce the spectacles of raptors and owls hunting and catching them with views much closer than normal.

Moonburst Over Astley

Although I mainly blog about birds and birding, I do occasionally take landscape photographs and indeed, I am hoping to do more of this in the future. With the prospect of clear skies and a bright moon, I went down to Astley Green Colliery this evening to take a shot I've been thinking of for a quite a while.

The Colliery is now a coal-mining museum and I believe the pit head winding gear is the last one still standing in the whole of this region and, as such, it is quite an iconic structure around these parts.

My aim was to take a photograph of the moon with the colliery pit head gear in the foreground and it has to be said that I didn't realise how difficult this was going be in terms of exposure. I've taken photos of the moon before with decent results, but trying to include some detail in the foreground objects proved to be very challenging. Either the moon was too bright or the pit head too dark.

After several attempts with different settings, it became clear that I wasn't going to be able to get the shot I wanted tonight. In the end I had to opt for an atmospheric shot with the moon having a starburst effect. I now think the only way of pulling the shot is to bracket a number of exposures and combine them together using software.

This is a shot to which I will return many times.

Welcome to GeekTeacher's Astro Scrapbook

Hi there! I've started this new blog off to avoid filling my main birding blog with astro photos.  With the current Coronavirus lockdown situation, I'm not going out birding at the moment and I'm spending a lot more time standing in the freezing cold in my back garden at night, looking up towards the wonderful skies.

I decided to backdate this blog to the moments where I think I began taking a real interest in astrophotography, which really means when I started taking photos of the moon. Since I got some decent digital camera equipment, I've regularly taken photos of the moon and I can trace my interest back to Astley Moss where I took a partial lunar eclipse in 2013.

But our family also went to France in 1999 to view the total eclipse of the sun which I recorded on video - I've still to find that tape so I can digitise it for inclusion in this blog.

This current phase of more intense interest in the night sky started back in 2019 when I visited North Wales on a landscape photography shoot.  I'd been seeing a lot of Milky Way photos on Facebook by people who live there and I thought, well if they can do that, so can I.  So I arranged a trip out with Pete Lawless to do some landscape photography during the day, with the plan of meeting up with a couple of the locals in the evening to do some Milky Way shots on Anglesey. Things didn't quite work out like that and I ended up doing it in the dark on my own in the Ogwen Valley.  Well, I say on my own - there was an almost constant stream of people going up to wild camp near Llyn Ogwen and coming down from Tryfan with headlights on whilst I was there!

Anyway that's how it all started, let's see where it goes from here.