Les

A few interesting groups and individual spots on view today with some bright faculae surrounding the lower spot at the 8'o clock position. The same set up as usual.

This happens to me too, very annoying.

The Sun is very active just now with plenty of sunspots and the Nikon L29 compact even picked up the more elusive faculae the whitish structures just visible in the second image. They are caused be hot bright gas clouds emanating from below the surface and often herald the onset of fresh sunspots. The images were taken on April 27th using the equipment above,

Lovely picture. I remember Alan Titchmarsh once wryly observed along these lines -you go to the trouble of buying your tomato seeds in January put two seeds in each a peat pot of compost keeping them inside making sure not to let them dry out and turning the trays every day. Then after a couple of weeks pick out the weaker plant, then when you think that the risk of frost is over put them into grow bags in the green house. Water them every day making sure you open the doors and windows, dampen down the floor to increase humidity on hot days and cover the plants with fleece if a cold night is forecast. Shake the flowering plants regularly to aid pollination and pinch out the off shots. Then all being well by August you will have a lovely crop of tomatoes - just as they are cheap in the shops! Off course he was joking as growing tomatoes is immensely satisfying and much better than forced tasteless shop bought fruits.

Unlike night time deep sky work in which a moderate to large reflector is required solar imaging is much less demanding require nothing more than a small refractor. In fact large telescopes are not only not needed they gather so much light its a disadvantage. It used to be that up to about 30 years ago the amateur projected the Suns image from a small refractor onto a white card and photographed any features directly. These days modern refractors are largely constructed from ABS plastic making projection impossible without destroying the telescope! Nowadays full objective Baader filter film is used which cuts out over 99% of light. Although expensive this film gives a nice natural Solar image. Not only is a fairly cheap small telescope adequate for Solar imaging a driven mount is not really vital (but it makes life easier). Using a compact camera on a digiscope bracket is the easiest route to solar imaging and no other adaptors are required. Once fitted to the bracket lining up the the camera lens to a low power eyepiece is best done in daylight (or brightly lit room) away from the scope. Great care must be taken that the moving camera lens doesn't collide with the eyepiece after making the fine adjustments. The lowest powered eyepiece possible should be used preferably 25mm fl or higher. The image to start with will be heavily vignetted so the camera digital zoom has to be used until any peripheral shading is eliminated. Focusing of the telescope is vital so focus (with the filter removed) at some distant terrestrial object at least a mile away before attempting a Solar shot(remembering to replace the filter of course).You may have to bracket the focusing both ways using a half dozen of shots or so. Astro photography is a very safe pass time usually but great caution is require when mixing lenses with the Sun ,a moments carelessness can cause damage to equipment and personal injury. Best not do this stuff if kids or grown idiots are around! It is safe if you show common sense and keep your wits about you however.

A large spot adorns the solar disc today with the hint of another appearing from the far side in the next few days. The image was digiscoped using a 90mm f10 refractor. The camera was a Nikon Coolpix L29 compact. Exposure Compensation set at -1.3 and a little tweaking using Faststone.

Being spoiled by all the clear, still and relatively mild nights. Here's another galaxy from the super cluster and one of my favourites. Its M64 or the Black Eye Galaxy. A spiral 1/3 the size of our galaxy and one of the nearer ones at 'only' 12 million light years distant! But what this system lacks in stature make up for it by its distinctive bright nucleus contrasting with its huge dark dust lane. Taken at prime focus on a driven 16" Newtonian and a the above camera. 25 sec exposure at 3200 ISO

The Harry Worth of the bus world, oops may be showing my age here!

The spring skies in the early hours galaxies abound. This is because we look out through a thin section of our galaxy towards a vast supercluster of these stellar cities which has 1000's of members and spans through five different constellations. Here are just two members The famous Whirlpool and Sombrero galaxies. First The Whirlpool is a classic spiral with its bullied neighbour in tow is 37million light years away is face on to us. Second The Sombrero is 41 million light years distant and on the opposite side of the supercluster is about the same size as our galaxy is another spiral and is edge on to us. It has a seam of thick dust running through it. Taken with a 16" driven Newtonian and a Nikon 3200D at prime focus. 1600ISO and 3200ISO respectively and 20 second exposure.

M97 Owl Nebula

As I have said DSLR a surprisingly good at giving reasonable results of Planetary Nebulae. However one famous one is the Owl Nebula (so called because of its owl appearance) near the Plough asterism, has the humble DSLR struggling. I think this is due to it being older and spread out and losing a lot of the fluorescent wavelengths that DSLR are good at picking up. The Owl eyes are detectable visually but the central star isn't but it does appear on images easily. Funnily enough a owl was hooting last night while I was observing it. Although not that good I've included a image of this ghostly object using the above equipment. I ramped up the ISO to 6400 with a exposure of 20 seconds.

Hanging around a woman's boutique is only acceptable for a man if he's got camera round his neck-its art-at least that's your story!

HI Dennis, Indeed my Newtonian is on a driven Dobsonian mount, which is not really designed for long DSLR exposures. Much smaller scopes on these mounts in theory can also give good results but the lower light grasp of these mean longer exposure times are needed with the inherent inaccuracies of the Dobsonian altazimuth system causing unacceptable trailing. With a 16" mirror the extra light grasp means I can keep exposures below 30 seconds.

It was a lovely two story house. I have a photograph of it somewhere. The owner was OK as she was in Sweden at the time. Luckily there were no animals in the house apart for the cat which had escape route through the cat flap. The hedge was untouched as it was some distance away.

I'm a gardener to trade and I used to maintain a garden in the Colinton area of Edinburgh and there was a noisy feral Cockatoo living in a thick Laylandii hedge nearby. The customer told me what it was. I don't know what it lived on and I don't know if its still about as I don't do the garden anymore because the house burnt down!