Andrew’s Astronomy Blog

It’s time for a new blog. The recent week long outage and total lack of communication from 1&1 support while I didn’t know if I was going to see the content again caused me to think long and hard about the service here. Once the site was restored I contacted support and asked them about taking a backup copy of the site. Short answer; It isn’t possible. That made my already uncertain position here untenable.

So, I’ve now setup a new hosting account at Zen Internet, created a blog and pointed one of my other domain names to it. This blog will remain while I manually transfer content out of it and when that process is complete the account will be closed.

The new address is http://blog.andrewluck.me.uk. See you there.

Enroute to La Palma we decided on spending a day in Madrid and totally by chance the hotel was a stones throw away from the Madrid Royal Observatory. What can you do in circumstances like these but organise a tour.

Unfortunately, the tours are conducted in Spanish but the two young ladies who showed us around were very pleasant and would answer questions in English. My thanks to them for making the visit so enjoyable.

The main building  was constructed in 1845 although the observatory had been established around 1785 and was home to a Herschel 25ft reflecting telescope of 24″ aperture until it’s destruction by French Napoleonic troops.

The main building has a transit telescope, the slot for which is visible on the right of this picture. Unfortunately, photography wasn’t permitted inside this building but there is a picture in the guidebook. Ask me if you’d like to see it.

Highlight of the visit though was the beautiful reconstruction of the original Herschel telescope, housed in it’s own building.

Tomorrow we meet Dan at the airport for the flight to La Palma. The weather forecast isn’t looking too good so far. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Joan Genebriera of AstroPalma kindly pointed out that there is a large white spot on my last image of Saturn. This is the giant storm that’s been raging since the end of last year so I’m quite pleased to have captured it. There’s a Hubble picture of the storm here: http://planetary.org/image/saturn_JBNY02SQQ_hubble_20110312.png

Having had time to sort through the pictures, I like this one rather better. I really underestimated just how bright the sun would be at this low altitude, but this one has less distracting flare. For the next time a solar filter will be a must.

 So, this is ISO 100, 1/200 second at f/32. For later pictures I used 1/4000. The bright sun really messed up the auto white balance and gave the entire picture an orange glow. I’ve rebalanced this image towards the blue so the colours are closer to what I actually saw.

Just as I thought I wasn’t going to see it the cloud dispersed sufficiently and there it was. First picture is here, more to follow.

In the last picture, the crescent of the moon is almost invisible against the dawn light.

While on holiday in Northumberland we took advantage of an open evening at the Kielder Observatory. The evening started with a talk by the Director, Gary Fildes about the Universe and our place in it. This was followed by a tour of the facility and views of the Moon and Saturn through the 20″ Newtonian and 14″ SCT telescopes as the sky didn’t get dark enough to look at anything fainter.

http://www.kielderobservatory.org/ 

There’s been rather a trend on this blog towards pairs recently and to continue this theme here’s an image of NGC 4567 & NGC 4568, sometimes known as the Siamese Twins. This pair of interacting galaxies are part of the Virgo cluster and for some years were considered a line of sight pairing as there’s no visual evidence of interaction.

This image is the result of a stack of 14 five minute frames taken on GRAS-4 over two nights.