April 2011 Sunspots

As we have been having some nice summery weather in April, it gives us a great chance to get out in the garden and do some solar imaging. I have recently had a major equipment change, and sold my LX200 (sad to see you go) and I now have an NEQ6 Pro mount instead, with

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Yuri Gagarin T-Shirt

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight with a Gagarin t shirt. The Vostok Capsule was essentially a 2.5m diameter sphere. The Vostok Rocket that it sat on was fuelled by very powerful but seriously noxious propellants: ammonium perchlorate, aluminium powder, and a polymer of butadiene as well as liquid oxygen

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BBC Sky at Night Magazine Just £27

To celebrate the 700th Episode of the BBC Sky at Night, you can now purchase a 12 month subscription to the Sky at Night Magazine for just £27 that includes free delivery. The offer is only open for a limited time and you need to pay via direct debit. Buy it here: https://tinyurl.com/4fd7wnu

Ian King Advanced Imaging Day

On Saturday 13th November I headed on over to a small village outside of Rugby to attend an Advanced CCD Imaging Course run by Ian King. I did not know what to expect when it came to the venue, all I knew was that it was in a village hall. Well usually village halls conjure

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Hidden Treasures Book Review

Hidden Treasures is a big, heavy, nearly 600 page book which includes an original selection of 109 deep-sky objects. None of the objects are included in either the Messier or Caldwell catalogues. Together with this all the objects are supposed to be visible with a 4” telescope under dark skies. The Hidden Treasures book is

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Observatory Power Supply from Rapid

Whenever you buy a dew heater system you need something to power it, for some reason I went for a Battery Powerpack from Maplin, which is very good and has an invertor on it, compressor, 2 12v cigar sockets and a USB charger socket, battery clamps, a worklight etc etc. But I hate having to remember

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Control Your Observatory PC Remotely

Since the weather has been very cold lately I thought about putting in a warm type of partition in the observatory to keep me warm whilst imaging, but I knew there was a way to remotely control your PC, as a lot of people do it, now I know how and it did not cost

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Partial Solar Eclipse Image on Stargazing Live

As my previous post mentioned I was amazed to see my partial solar eclipse included at the end of the BBC Look East TV News programme. Mainly because there were so many good images taken by those people who did not get clouded out. I also sent my image in to the BBC Stargazing Live

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Partial Solar Eclipse Image on Look East TV News

The day of the partial solar eclipse I emailed my photos to various TV channels and web sites. One of those was the local Look East News on BBC1. Most people you send images to do not reply and tell you it is included the programme so you have to just watch and record the

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Partial Solar Eclipse Images

I was expecting this morning to be cloudy in Cambridgeshire today, but amazingly the skies started to clear at around 8.30am. I then just had to wait for the Sun to appear from behind the house that backs onto mine, as I was in my back bedroom with the window open taking the photos of

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