Comet C/2006 W3/Christensen 21.13UT

This comet and C/2006 OF2/Broughton are the two brightest comets available for imaging at the moment at magnitude 10. I decided to try Christensen as it was well placed directly above the house near the constellation Cepheus. The evening looked good to start with, cold and clear skies all around. I was set up by 8.10UT with the Canon 350D and Equinox ED80 setup. I had intended on taking an hours worth of images, but had forgotten the intricacies of setting up the dastardly piece of Chinese gadgetry that is the timer remote release. Having failed to remember NOT to use the numbering sequence, but instead set the number of exposures to infinity I happily left the whole setup whirring away and returned to find it had only taken 12x 1 minute exposures - AAAAARRGH !!! Fortunately cloud had rolled in anyway so I would have been foiled by the atmosphere in any case. Thinking it was a waste of time I ran the 12 images through DeepSky Stacker to see what showed up and to my amazement there was a tiny fuzzy green blob sitting amongst a rich starfield!!! Green fuzzy visible just to the left of centre........

Cropped version - comet at centre

Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

This was a trial run in advance of the highly anticipated conjunction of the moon, Venus and Jupiter in the early evening sky on Monday 1st December at around 5pm. I wanted to try and capture the planets reflected in the canal water and just about managed it before the canal was plunged into darkness. Jupiter at top and Venus below. Canon 350D, ISO 400, 8 seconds.

The Sun 28-11-08 - Large Filament in NE

Bright clear and sunny up to midday today then a milky cloud layer appeared from the south and ruined the seeing by the time I was imaging. Still managed to catch some decent images though just before the cloud rolled in for the rest of the day. Only one decent flame type prom on show in the NE with all the others being quite faint. The large filament first seen yesterday is still on show and a bit longer now in the NE close to the flame prom. No other surface detail was evident.

The Sun 25-11-2008 - Fine Feathery Proms

Gorgeous crisp, clear and cold sunny day today. First chance I have had to image the sun since the 7th November! Quite tricky to image now as the sun is low in the south all afetrnoon and reaches its max height just as it goes behind the neighbours tree. I also have our own trees to contend with so there was a lot of mount moving going on. All worth it though as there was a fine display of proms in the north west which showed very delicate detail in the DMK21 at high magnification. A small filament in the NE close to the only other main prom on display today. Great to be imaging/observing again !!

The Sun 7-11-08

Managed to get some images in between the fast moving clouds today. AR 11007 has just gone over the limb but a small remnant can still be seen in Ha and CaK on the SW limb. On the NE limb in CaK an area of plage brightening was showing up which may be a proto active region forming although there are no sunspots so far. Another possible area of plage lay to the north, but was very faint. There was a lovely tall flame prom in the east at 10.30 but by the time I was imaging it had reduced in size to a small bright claw (bottom right in image below). There was no surface detail in the Ha view.

The Sun 1-11-08 - AR11007 starting to decay

Got a brief window for observing this morning before 11am then cloud rolled in. AR11007 is still visible but the main spots and pores are much smaller and difficult to resolve. The same filaments from yesterday are still visible and there was a nice flame prom on the NW limb with other smaller groups of proms scattered around in the north and south.