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

Mercury Transit

Mercury Transit 7th May 2003

The transit or passage of a planet across the face of the Sun is a relatively rare occurrence. As seen from Earth, only transits of Mercury and Venus are possible. On the average, there are 13 transits of Mercury each century.

On Wednesday, 2003 May 07, We were indeed treated to another transit of a lifetime when Mercury's transit of the Sun was seen for the first time since 1999. The entire event was widely visible from the Europe, Africa and Asia,. Japan Australia, and New Zealand and witnessed the beginning of the transit but the Sun had set before the event ended. Similarly, observers in western Africa, eastern North America and eastern South America saw the end of the event since the transit will already be in progress at sunrise from those regions. But luckily here in the UK we were treated to a cloud free entire transit.

Saham Sunset

Saham Toney Sunset.

This is again a favourite image of mine A wonderful sunset Using a canon 300mm zoom Lens on the EOS300d. A 1 second exposure was enough to capture an amazing sky colour.

Solar

As this is a new site for me I have found a few of the nice images I have taken in the past.

Here are a couple of my Images from the Venus Transit of 8th June 2004.

On this beautifully clear summer morning we experienced a once-in-a-lifetime rare astrological and astronomical event. Approximately every 121 years, the planet Venus moves between the Sun and our line of vision so that Venus passes directly across the face of the Sun. When the Moon passes across the face of the Sun it's called an eclipse. When a planet passes across the Sun's face it's more precisely known as an occultation.

Telescope used was my 10" Orion Optics F4.8 reflector on a Vixen Polaris GP mount.

I used a baader solar filter on the scope and a yellow filter over the camera lens.

I was very pleased with the results.