Tuesday 4 January 2011

Partial Solar Eclipse

Good morning everyone. My last day before I return to taining. Haven't done a great deal of astronomy since November. I had the chance to go to our club observatory at Great Ellingham last night as we are hosting open evening's for Stargazing Live. A good turn out considering the cloud cover was 100%. Still visitors had the chance to see scopes set up on our astro pad and some visitors even bought their own scopes and asked for help in getting the best from them. A tour of the control room and gallery before we went upstairs to see the monster 20". Earlier that evening jupiter was visible so we had the webcam set up and showing a live view through a laptop. That was until the visitors and the clouds arrived. Anyway everyone I met was impressed with our set up and already looks like we may have a few new members from the first night.

I was tasked with a small errand this morningas Kate left for work. Looking east was again clouded out but I took the camera with me just in case of a break as it was already 08.30 as the partial eclipse was well under way. I had just returned and parked up when I saw a gap in the clouds. I dumped everything on the lawn and fired up the camera. Just enough time to take a couple of images before we were clouded out again.


Taken with the 40D Iso 100 1/160 sec for both images. Hope you like them

California Nebula

  NGC1499 The California Nebula. Discovered in 1889 The California Nebula is an emission nebula in the constellation of Perseus, currently v...