Circumzenithal arc

I'd always heard that these were ghostly sights, but at its brightest this one was superb. Is it just that people go around looking at the pavement rather than the sky?

A few geosats near Jupiter

I took a number of 30sec exposures with a fixed camera. The stars fly by but geostationary satellites are fixed (approximately). How many can you see? Video didn't load so here is a composite.

Pegasus to Fomalhaut (via Jupiter)

This non guided shot shows the view from Pegasus to the southern horizon

Sundog

There were a nice set of sundogs (parhelia) last evening. Here is a picture of one with contrail shadow.

The view from down under

At the BAA Deep Sky Section meeting the other day there was an interesting talk about imaging via remote telescopes. The scopes mentioned were #1-Sierra Stars Observatory in New Mexico where you request particular images and your request is queued and done. #2- Global Rent a Scope based also in NM and in Australia, where you control the scope in real time. These cost about £1 per minute. Probably a better deal on SSO than GRAS because there you are charged only for the exposure time rather than the slew, focus time etc. The BAA offer a discount if Council feel that you have a worthy project.

Anyway GRAS offer a try before you buy scheme with scope and image quality limitations, so I signed up for that. Most of last week it was snowing in New Mexico and Australia was offline. On Friday morning G13 (Takahashi Sky 90 with SBIG ST-2000XMC on a Paramount) was available in oz so I grabbed it and did a couple of 600sec (10 min) images including this one of the Trifid nebula. Within seconds the jpeg was delivered in my mail. You need to sign up for the full package in order to be able to download full res FITS images.

The blurb on site compares the economics of GRAS compared to the cost of the whole system - pointing out that the money you spend on your own kit just gives so many clear nights in a year, whereas using a remote system you have a much better chance of many clear nights for the same number of £s.

So will I go for it? I suppose that if we have winters like that now finished ,compounded with a time of ill health discouraging me from going out in the cold I might.

On the other hand it may be easier to make my observatory remotely operable.

Off topic

Haven't done much astronomy for a while (actually I did do a polar alignment tonight) but I've been into GigaPanning. This is the combo of a robotised tripod head centred on the nodal point of a compact camera set to full zoom. This enables extremely detailed panoramas - including from tens to hundreds of images. It comes from the people who assemble the images from the Mars Spirit and Opportunity probes. These are a couple of early links (luckily the GigaPan site has room for these large images
http://gigapan.org/gigapans/43208/.


http://gigapan.org/gigapans/43929/