A number of members of the Society are interested in astrophotography, and a Special Interest Group has been formed under Gordon Ewen. The intention is to assist members who are interested in this topic and help them to get more from their efforts.

They have had several meetings, and here are some of their results.

Click on any of the photos for larger versions.

If you would like to join in the group's activities, write to events-at-ldas.org.uk (Replace "-at-" with "@")

Safety note : NEVER look at the sun without using proper eye protection - This can cause serious damage to your eyes and even blindness.

2010
December

2011
January
February
March
April

December
The month seemed to present a lot of nights with much cloud, very disappointing. It seemed that every night I looked out there were no breaks at all. You need perseverance for this hobby! On the night of the Geminid meteor shower I noted the forecast was no good and that was how it turned out. The next night did not promise much better, but I kept checking the sky from about 7pm. At about 9pm I looked out and noticed the sky had cleared. At about 9.30pm I got lucky and, from my house, saw a bright meteor (about mag 0-1) move south straight through Orion. I decided to walk up to the local park with my DSLR and a wide angle lens. When I got there. I mounted the camera on a tripod and took a string of 30 sec shots hoping that eventually I would get a meteor. Guess what, I did. It is rather faint, at the bottom of the picture. Return to top of page
January
My next night of observing was the night of the Quadrantids on Jan 3rd. Another wash out with cloud. I stayed up until 1.30am hoping for a break in the clouds, but no luck. It did not look too promising for the eclipse the next morning either. I set my alarm for 7.30 am anyway and hoped for the best. I checked the sky at 4am and 6am and it was still cloudy. I cancelled the alarm, thinking it was not going to happen. However, I woke up at about 8.15 and noticed it seemed bright outside. I checked and could see the sun through some broken cloud. I got a reasonable view with a double staked polarizing filter and managed to get a picture through a compact camera. Some luck at last. Jan 8 : A cold clear evening, so I set up my CPC 9.25 and had good views of Jupiter and Orion. I took some pictures of M42 with the DLSR just to try it out. Jan 9 :Up at 4am to look at Saturn and, particularly, Venus. Saturn was very interesting, and Titan, Hyperion, Tethys and Enceladus were clearly visible. I took some webcam footage of Venus and processed it later on that day; result is shown on the right. Later that morning, I had the CPC out to look at the sun through the solar filter film and a solar continuum filter. Not quite H-alpha but I was impressed just the same. I hope to do a write up on my solar observing next month. Jan 14 :The sky cleared in the late afternoon as forecast so I set up the CPC and polar aligned it (seemed to take ages!). First I took some pics of the Moon with the DSLR. I later created a composite of 2 pics, shown on the right. I then started to image M42 through the CPC while controlling the camera through a laptop. This was a really good way to control the camera, best thing is you can programme all the shots you want and go and have a cup of tea while it shoots them! I took various exposure lengths and played with the ISO settings. The shot (to be added) is a single shot with no further processing, so you can see it’s not too difficult to get something recognisable with a minimal effort. I also took a shot of Betelgeuse and was pleased to see it came out orange. Later on my daughter and I walked up to the park and saw a meteor while we were there. Jan 25 : On holiday, in Egypt. One night we went on a stargazing trip. After the obligatory camel ride we arrived at the viewing site. I was impressed; two 10” inch and one 12” Meade SCT’s were set up. The ‘astronomer’ was very theatrical, and we saw, Sirius, Jupiter, and a few other NGC objects. Jayne and I even saw two meteors. Best of all was to be somewhere where the Milky Way could be easily seen – not like Stevenage! Shame we did not have longer there. Jan 29 : Up at Standalone observatory for a couple of hours. There were 5 of us there for a couple of hours. We gave up when the ice on the Meade corrector plate got too thick for good viewing! Return to top of page	Venus, Jan 9 Moon, Jan 14
February
Feb 4/5 : Astrofest. Bought the guide camera I was after and a few filters. Can’t wait to get cracking with them. Some excellent talks were given, especially the one debunking all the apocalyptic nonsense regarding 2012, brilliant. Feb 7 : Had CPC out again and set up to get some more pictures of M42. This time I used a light pollution filter and exposures of up to 4 minutes. I got lots of nebulosity but the tracking was not great. Still, it's all progress, and I can’t wait to try again. Feb 11 : Did some solar imaging. It’s a lot easier, and a lot warmer, than night observing! Played around with the camera settings to see what I could get that looked the best. Does anyone know if the gamma settings are best adjusted in camera or in later processing? Or does it not matter? Feb 14 : Did some more solar imaging today. I am still playing with the camera settings. Lovely sitting in the sun … (See first picture) Return to top of page	Sun, Feb 14
March
Mar 4 : Up at Standalone with three members of the public, Robert, James and Jerry. Very cold again and the sky seem to have more pollution than a few weeks earlier probably due to thin mist in the air. Looked M42 through different filters, a double star in Leo, and tried to find the Rosette nebula – we found the cluster, but could see no nebulosity. Mar 7 : Some great weather at last. A beautiful sunny day that was ideal for a spot of solar observing. There is a lot of activity on the sun at the moment, mostly sunspots and hardly any prominences. Got a couple of good shots after using Registax to process some video. In the evening I set up the CPC 9.25. After the usual faffing around getting polar alignment (oh for a permanent set up) I did some DSLR imaging of M42 (yes, I am obsessed with it, but it is a good easy target). I also had a look at NGC2309. Through the eyepiece I could only just see it as a faint elongated smear. I tried a 10min exposure at 800 ASA on the DSLR to see if I could get an image. I did, but it was very faint and noisy. I will try again once I have a guide camera to improve the tracking. I packed up at 1.15am. Mar 8 : Another lovely day and some even better sun spots. After the low activity levels of the last two years this is great. There was a prominence that looked like it was bursting from the limb of with some violence at the surface; I was particularly pleased with how this picture came out, I must remember the settings I used! Some chance. That was it for March. I also read Richard Panek’s book about the telescope. It was OK but I found his style really hard work, rather complex writing. I have put it in the society library. I found it so odd I was not looking forward to reading his latest book – The 4% Universe. However, having got about half way through it I think it is excellent. It tells the story of how we came to ‘know’ what we don’t know about the universe by telling the the story through the astronomers and physics involved over about 100 years. It really is good as you feel you get to know the characters. You learn that academics, if you did not know already, are just as competitive, cut-throat and as underhand as anyone else! It has really resparked my interest in taking up an astronomy course again. Next is Brian Greene’s latest book. I shall be reading that next week on the beach! Return to top of page	Sun, Mar 7 Sunspot 1166, Mar 7 Prominence, Mar 8 Sunspots, Mar 8
April
Apr 1 : The afternoon was bright with some breaks so I had the Solarscope 50 out for a look at the sun. One spot was visible and a prominence. Mike Atkins arrived in the afternoon and got his scope set up, then he, Alan and I went to the bar for some food. When we came out at about 8.30pm it was cloudy. Unfortunately, there must have been a lot of high level haze in the sky as the transparency was poor. So poor, that for most of the time the Milky Way was not visible, though it did improve a bit after about 1.30 am. Another problem was the wind, which was quite strong. Photography was out of the question since the scope was being buffeted too much. I had a look at the following Messier objects: 103, 44, 53, 49, 61, 51, 94, 13, 81, and 82 (my favourite for the night). I also had a look at the Double Cluster again. M13 was fantastic, I’d not seen it before and it was very impressive. Robert Townsend joined us for some of the evening. I finally went to bed at about 3am. Apr 2 : Cloudy all day, so no solar observing. Had a kip in the afternoon – very refreshing! Tom arrived late afternoon and later on the LDAS contingent went to the bar to eat. We came out at about 8.30 pm to cloudy skies. We hung around for about 30 minutes and there was no sign of a break in the clouds so we went back to the bar! We came back out at 10pm to find an almost completely clear sky, so we got the scopes set and started observing, shortly after which Robert joined us. We also had the same transparency problem as the night before, but fortunately little wind. We looked at M37, NGC 2392 (Eskimo nebula) through various filters, M108 and M13 again. We played around with a variety of eyepieces and had some fantastic views (to me at least) of M13 through Mike’s massive super-wide 40mm Meade Plossl. We also tried some Nagler and Televue eyepieces. We compared the views of Saturn in a Pentax 10mm, Nagler 22 and TV Radian 10mm. The Radian had it we agreed, but the Pentax was close. The Cassini division was easily visible as were four of Saturn’s moons; it was interesting to see how the different eyepieces showed the moons. We also had a go with Mike’s binoviewer – very interesting effect. Because you are using both eyes the brain thinks its seeing something like 3D. I had a look at Regulus at one point to re-sync the alignment. Regulus was very sharp but seemed to sit in a silver grey background giving away the poor transparency. Packed up at about 2.30 am given the poor visibility and I was getting rather tired. Overall, it was great. I had some very good views of objects I had not seen before and I also learned more about my telescope. With good eyepieces the optics really are good. However, I think that when the scope is on the wedge the centre of gravity is rather high which makes it rather prone to wind vibration. Be no problem in a sheltered location of course. I also bought a 2” diagonal and tried some of Mike’s 2” eyepieces. I was impressed and now I need to buy some more eyepieces! What did surprise me was how many people did not observe. A lot of people were saying the sky was rubbish, I suppose it depends on what you are used to. If you were after really faint objects you were not going to see them, I guess. I booked my place for September. Apr 6 : Good weather during the day so had the Solarscope out. Not too much going on spotwise, but there was an interesting prominence visible. I got an image of it (note the sun itself is overexposed to get a good image of the prominence). Apr 7 : Another good day for solar observing. Apr 8 : Love all this sitting in the sun! Some faint prominences were visible today. Apr 9 : Helped with the Letchworth town centre display during the morning. Took the Solarscope along, views of the sun certainly get the ‘wow’ factor. Apr 11 : Set up the CPC 9.25 in the evening as the sky had cleared. About 5 minutes after I got it all set up it chucked it down. I managed to get a cover over the telescope just in time. Fortunately, it cleared about an hour later so I got to work setting up the Baader Smartguider 2 that had arrived a day or so earlier. It has the advantage of not needing a pc to run it, and it can programme a series of shots on an SLR too. I had piggy backed an 80mm refractor onto the main tube and got everything set to try the autoguiding. Frustratingly the unit did not function at all. I checked all the connections, pressed all the right buttons, all to no avail. I took it in-doors and tried to get it working, and eventually it did power up. However, the buttons on the keypad did not function properly. Most of the time pressing them did nothing, and sometimes pressing ‘OK’ caused the unit to shutdown. This was the second duff guider I have had in the last 2 months. Today I took it back to the shop I bought it from and they admitted they had been having problems with these guiders (the Chinese were blamed!). You’d think that if they had been having problems they would test them before sending them out. It’s not doing the shop's reputation much good either. They agreed to get me another, tested first. 16 April : Some good features on the sun today, prominences and sunspots. Here is a picture of sunspot 1193: I think this is probably my best sun picture yet. Here is a prominence from today as well. It is tricky getting the prominences. Generally, they are very faint relative to the sun itself so the gain has to be quite high on the webcam which results in the over exposed sun. Apr 17 : The sun was partly obscured by thin high cloud most the morning. I left the Solarscope and webcam running all morning hoping for some clear sky, but it did not happen. Never mind, the forecast for the next few days looks very good. By the way, Don’t worry about the sun changing colour, it’s just my editing (or lack of) skills. Return to top of page	Prominence, Apr 6 Prominence, Apr 8 Sunspots and faculae, Apr 8 Sunspots, Apr 10 Sunspot 1193, Apr 16 Prominences, Apr 16

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