This was taken with my DSLR mounted on the telescope tube, and using the telescope’s motor drive to track the sky for a five minute exposure (click to embigulate). We have looked at the Pleiades before, but I’m quite pleased with this picture because it brings out some colours, and a tree in my garden managed to sneak into the frame. You can see that the tree blurs slightly as though it’s moving; actually, the tree stayed still, while the camera and the sky moved.
I have set up a bird café in my garden, and I have already got some interesting diners. Here are some intrusively candid pictures of them (no release forms were signed).
The Moon! An amazing world right above your head, just three days away: ideal for today’s busy lifestyles.
I have often written about the Moon before, and taken pictures of the crescent Moon, the full Moon, craters on the Moon, a lunar eclipse, and mentioned the Moon’s powers of spiritual refreshment. It is amazing when you think all of that is available absolutely free, with no subscription required, just by looking up. Even wicked David Cameron cannot prevent us from enjoying it.
Tonight’s Moon is just past First Quarter and this is always a good time for seeing the Moon through a telescope or binoculars, because it is early morning on the part of the Moon that faces us, and so there are long shadows which give us maximum contrast. Reconnaissance satellites looking at Earth are aimed to pass over their targets in the early morning or late afternoon for the same reason. More precisely, they are often Sun-synchronous: chasing the Sun continually so that it is always morning below them, like Concorde racing across the Atlantic.
A day on the Moon lasts a fortnight, which is weird. When it is full Moon for us, the Sun is shining directly down on the part of the Moon that faces us, so it is noon there. By the time the Moon has reached Last Quarter, the Sun is just setting for the imaginary Moon folk, and when the Moon is new, it is midnight there. So it would be a very long day and you would almost certainly need a giant beer after work to recover. Luckily the nights are a fortnight long too, which would be a popular thing for the Governmint to introduce here. I would certainly vote for two weeks extra sleep a night.
This is taken with the Canon 350D and 200mm telephoto lens, a 1/10 sec exposure sharpened in the computer and filtered to remove the red channel, which gives slightly better definition because most of the skyglow here in London is red.
In conclusion, then, the Moon.
I hugely enjoy making these photo movies, which are a bit like Pages from Ceefax if you remember that. Late at night on TV when they had run out of programmes and had to go to the shop to buy more, there would be a selection of digital textual information and bad ASCII art pictures, all accompanied by inappropriately relaxing music.
It takes a long time though as it takes me about three years to take enough photos to make one of these. Also Jon Hopkins albums do not come out all that often to enable me to take his unique and inspiring music and use it to lend an undeserved glamour to my grainy cell phone photographs. So enjoy this one, and peace be upon you in My name.
Also, enjoy a special appearance by Liz’s foot in this movie.
(The music is Cerulean by Jon Hopkins.)
