Equinox SkyCamp 2011

Bit of a belated report...anyway...
The equinox skycamp took place in the latter half of September 2011. With the weather forecast not looking too good I decided to spend most of the time observing rather than taking images like last year. This year my family and I could only stay during main weekend rather than spend a whole ten days like last year.

Friday night was unfortunately not clear so I could not set up the telescope for polar alignment...having said that as a veteran of these skycamps I can set the mount up in the right direction with just a compass. In fact The mount wasn't far off Polaris when I started to observe on the Saturday evening when was clear enough to allow me to precisely align the mount.

Saturday during the day was sunny and bright. There were fewer trade stands in the yellow field than previous years. However, there were quite a few people in the fields privately selling their equipment, including what I think was an eight inch refractor! I would love to know if someone purchased it, how on earth they got that home. It looked more than three metres long! Talks were going on during the day, including bob mizon .... The prize raffle took place in the early evening. The raffle seems to be getting more popular than ever and the tickets were all sold out by the time the raffle took place. First prize this year was a Nagler kindly donated by David Nagler of TeleVue worth £400.
Saturday late evening was a mixed bag of stars indispersed with patchy cloud. It apparently cleared in the early hours, but by then I was back in the lodge tucked up in bed!

Sunday was the traditional trip to Cromer. It was a sunny day and we did our usual walk by the beach. By the time it was getting dark it looked like it was clouding over again. However, I thought I would stay up a bit longer than the previous night and wait it out. By about 12:30-1am most people retired to their tents. However, in the south-east high in the sky I saw a small clear patch just where Jupiter was poking through. Over a period of an hour or so the clear patch grew until the whole sky was clear. I manage to satisfy my observing craving from the past few days and indulged myself with the delights of the Autumn sky. By three am I decided to call it a night as I had a long drive back to London the next day.

Despite the skies not meeting up to expectations it was a relaxing and enjoyable skycamp. Can't wait for this year's skycamp where I will hope to be doing some imaging by trying out my new Panasonic GF3 compact system camera.

Life!

Sometimes events in life takes over and things get left to one side for a while. I stopped posting until now. I am hoping to keep this blog active along with the sister site the Build scout. So enough of the cryptic stuff. Onwards and upwards!

Milky Way Movie

Checkout this amazing movie of the Milky Way taken on top of Spain's highest mountain El Teide.

1971

Tomorrow will be my fortieth birthday (6th April). A lot of has happened in Astronomy and spaceflight over the past forty years, so on the eve of my birthday lets time travel back to the year 1971 and see what was going on in the world of spaceflight and astronomy...

General:
Stephen Hawking demonstrates mathematically that the Big Bang must have come from a single point and postulated the existence of mini black holes.
It was the 400th anniversary of Johannes Kepler's death

Notable Dates:
January 31, 1971: Men were still flying to the Moon. Apollo 14 mission, with Alan Shepard Jr., Stuart A. Roosa, and Edgar D. Mitchell, was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

June 30, 1971: Tragedy! Three Russian cosmonauts Lieutenant-Colonel Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev were found dead in their Soyuz 11 space capsule after it made a perfect landing in Kazakhstan. 

April 19, 1971: The first ever space station of its kind Salyut 1 was launched by the USSR. 

July 26, 1971: Apollo 15 launched with David R Scott, Alfred M Worden and James B Irwin aboard. It was the first time the Lunar Rover was used. 

October 1971: Astrophysics - Joseph C. Hafele and Richard E. Keating took four atomic clocks aboard commercial airliners and flew twice around the world to test the theory of relativity.

28 October 1971: The last of the british built Black Arrow rocket with the satellite Prospero on board was launched from Woomera, Australia.

November 13, 1971: Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, swinging into its planned trajectory around Mars.  

Let's see what the next forty years has in store...

First Images of Mercury from Messenger

Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

This image is one of the first images of Mercury taken from the Messenger spacecraft in orbit around the planet. The image was taken at 5:20 am EDT on Mar. 29, 2011.

It looks very much like the Earth's Moon's surface close up. Like our Moon, Mercury is heavily cratered and shows similar features such as rays and rilles.

More images can be seen on the Nasa website.