A Happy Family

I have been taking a ton of photos these past few weeks, and I have a huge backlog of them. I though I would do a bit of a different post today and put up a few photos instead of just one. Here are Photos of five of the planets in our solar system.

First up is Venus, the second planet from the sun. I took this picture with my little 4 inch scope on the night of the meteor shower recently. You can clearly see the fact that it is a crescent, being lit from the sun from the left side of the picture.

Next up is Uranus. This is one of the gas giants far out in the outer solar system. You can see a few little dots just to the right of the planet. Those are some of its moons. Most of Uranus' moons are named after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

The next planet out is Neptune. Here we can see Neptune and its largest moon Triton. Neptune is the 8th and last planet from the sun.

One in from Uranus is Saturn, the 6th planet, and most peoples favorite. Unfortunately I never had a chance to take a really good photo of Saturn although I did see it looking excellent many times. On a good night you can see storms on the planet, and the gap between the rings and the planet itself!

I have put Jupiter, the 5th planet from the sun last because I think this is the best picture. I took this yesterday morning. You can clearly see the different bands of color on the planet itself, as well as the four moon all on one side at that moment.

To complete the set, we still need Mars, Mercury and Earth, the 4th, 1st and 3rd planets respectively. I have never had a chance to image Mars or Mercury through the telescope, and we are on earth, but I have captured them in pictures.

Here is Mars, the red planet, now with curiosity exploring away on its surface. This is an ancient photo of mine, but it is the only one I could find with Mars in It which is weird. Mars is the reddish dot high in the center of the frame.

And last but not least in any way is Mercury. Saturday morning was in fact the first morning I have actually taken a picture of Mercury. The little rocky planet is hard to capture because it is so small and close to the sun. If you go straight up from the top of the mountain - Mt Baker on planet earth to be exact - and slightly to the left up to just before the sky starts turning blue, you will find a tiny white dot which is Mercury.

Out of all of these planets, I still think that my favourite is a planet we call Earth.

And that concludes todays post. I hope you enjoyed!

Goddess in a Tree

It was sure a beautiful night on Friday. After I rushed up and took the photo in the last post, I set up my telescope to take a look at Saturn. I also took some photos of Venus.

Venus is in the tree in on the right. A car going by left some cool light streaks on the left and the city lights make some interesting colors in the sky, I quite like this photo if I do say so myself. The trees look so weird and alien...

Three Russians, Two Americans, and a Dutch Guy

Last night at about 42 minutes after 9 o'clock I was trying to decide whether to go to bed and to sleep or whether to go out and take a look at Saturn and take some photos. I checked Heavens Above, and low and behold there was an epic and awesome ISS pass coming up shortly. Very shortly. It was due to start at 48 minutes after 9 and reach its peak at 51 minutes after, then disappear within another minute or two.

I grabbed camera, tripod and telescope and rushed out to the car. I drove the couple of kilometers to the top of Mt Tolmie, screeched to a halt and jumped out, camera and tripod in hand. I was right on time at 48 minutes after, but I still had to set up my tripod, and then find the space station and set up a shot. I had looked at where  it was going to be the highest in the sky, but I had forgotten to see where it would first appear.

I finally spotted it as it passed through the highest point. It was incredibly bright. It was almost as bright as it ever gets in fact. It was much brighter than Venus is these days. I managed to get this photo of it as it headed down towards the horizon. It is the very bright one in the middle.

This is not the most brilliant photo I have ever taken, but I really like it. On reason is because in that little bright streak there are 6 people. They go all the way around the earth every hour and a half. It is such an incredible achievement that this football field sized, million pound space station is floating around us with people in it.

Another reason I like this photo is the unexpected presence of two other satellites gracing it with their light. One is easy to see. It passes from right to left above the ISS. The other is much more difficult to see, and I only noticed it when I was looking at the photo afterwards, but there is another one passing through at a similar angle to the right of the ISS down closer to the trees. If you draw a line from where the ISS crosses behind the trees to the uppermost little fluff of tree on the right hand side that is where you will find it.

So here is to the astronauts and cosmonauts and all the thousands of engineers behind them who make human space flight possible.

Welcome Back...Again

As you may have noticed, I have been very bad at posting lately. I have no good excuse except that this is the final week of the final term of second year university, and I am taking the maximum number of courses my university allows you to take. Tomorrow is the last day of class however, and after that is easter, and after that is all done, I am going to really try to make sure I get something up every day. The thing is that I like to take my time and write a good post. But as I just said in the previous sentence, that takes time, and time is not something I have had a lot of recently. So here is to onwards and upwards, and more frequent posts!

This is a photo from the 6th of March. A few posts ago, I posted a picture from about 20 minutes earlier. In this shot, the sun's light had almost completely gone, and the lights of the city were taking up their duty of lighting up the sky. Through the light clouds you can see a few stars, but the main features are Venus and Jupiter. Of course by now, Jupiter is much lower in the sky than Venus, and drops below the horizon just a short time after the sun sets.

Tonight at the UVic observatory open-house, we will have lots to look at, provided those pesky clouds clear off...The moon is almost full which is a bit annoying as it eats up all the faint objects in the sky because it is so bright. Then there is Jupiter for a little bit, Venus, Mars, Orion's Nebula, an coming up a bit later is Saturn. Pretty soon it will be high enough to get a good look at it, and it will keep getting higher all summer, replacing Jupiter as the best big planet to look at.

This year will be a good one for the observation of Saturn. The last few have not been great because when the planet is in our night sky, the rings were directly edge on  to our view. Now though they are not, and they are getting more and more tilted every day. They will be the most tilted to us around 2017.

I will do my best to keep posting regularly, but no guarantees for the next couple weeks.