It’s a perfect night for star-gazing tonight, I’ve just been out there wearing shorts and ‘T’-shirt looking at a triangle formed by the Moon, Venus and Jupiter. To be honest you don’t need a telescope to see them at their best and on a clear night like tonight, they are really obvious in the sky...
We haven’t had the moth trap out much lately, and when we have there has been nothing in it. We put it out on Friday evening and despite pretty good conditions, the catch was still pretty small: 2x Early Grey 1x Common Quaker 2x Hebrew Character There have been quite a few shoulder stripes at...
I’ve always liked the Horsehead nebula (also known as Barnard 33 in emission nebula IC 434). I remember looking at amazing photos of it in astronomy books and marvelling at it. It is s a dark nebula in the constellation Orion. The nebula is located just to the south of the star Alnitak, which is farthest west on Orion’s Belt. I haven;t yet been...
Following on from the BBC Stargazing Live programmes, there was an event at Nant yr Arian yesterday organised by the Physics Department at the university, so we booked onto it and had been looking forward to it for a while. Our plan was to get there mid afternoon, have a mountain bike ride / walk...
After spending some working on the basics of piggyback astro-photography with some shots of Orion, I decided to turn my attention to the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). I hadn’t been able to see this object yet, either with the naked eye or through the telescope, but I had a good idea of where it was. I therefore...
We had another lovely clear night last night so once again it was time to get our new telescope out. I had to have a bit if help from Anna to carry it out as my back was still sore, but we all wrapped up warm and soon had the necessary equipment in the garden....
At last, we’ve had a couple of clear nights, the first since Xmas, so we’ve been able to get our new telescope out. Anna was out rehearsing and doing the pantomime with the Scouts, so it was just Morgan and me. We set the scope up under clear skies, but on the first day night it wasn’t...
I’m really keen to take some photos through our new telescope. I knew this wouldn’t be easy. The world of astro-photography is complex with many diverse techniques that need to be learnt, practised and perfected. Some of the photos you can achieve are truly outstanding, but I think it will be many years before we...
Anna’s Mum bought Morgan and I a telescope for Christmas. I did of course have quite a bit of input into which one to get, and choosing a suitable telescope isn’t as easy as it might sound, so I thought I’d share some of my research here. The Factors to take into consideration. There were...