Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

An excellent talk was given by SAS member Maggie at our meeting last night, "The Copernican Revolution". Many thanks to Maggie.

White light Solar images showing sunspot groups AR1041 and AR1042 captured by Keith Davies of our society, on January 23, 2010

Steve Wainwright from our Society took the following images of sunspots this weekend: (also featured on http://www.spaceweather.com)

This is the confirming image in Ca K-line light:



The sunspot group on the left is AR 1041 (Active Region 1041) and the one on the right will presumably be AR 1042

These are the Sunspots in higher magnification at the same wavelength (393.4nm Ca K-line):




Two active regions in H-alpha light (656.3nm)

An excellent night was held down the National Botanic Garden of Wales last night with over 150 people in attendance. Astronomical talks were held in the Rotunda while members set out scopes, binoculars and video equipment outside. We had fantastically clear skies and observed Jupiter, the Moon, Mars and the Orion Nebula, as well as pointing out winter constellations such as Orion, Gemini, Taurus etc.

Some photos of the evening are shown below:

By Steve Wainwright

I have been working with Mintron Enterprise Co. Ltd of Taiwan on the development of a new, colour, deep-sky video camera to be used for observing and also Imaging. The camera testing is complete and is now in production. The name of the camera is the 72S85HP-EX-SW-OMEGA 1/2" chip colour deep-sky Mintron. These cameras can only be obtained from Telescope Planet.

Before Christmas I took the camera to the Fairwood observatory where a number of members meet on suitable Fridays for observing sessions. We used the camera for observing deep sky objects in real time on a 7" LCD TV screen.

We used a 5" f/5 Newtonian on an AZ GOTO mount. The most notable object we observed with the camera was the Orion Nebula.
This is what a live view looked like

Live View of M42/43 on a 7" TV screen

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The video stream was captured at different levels of frame accumulation to DVD.

The unique images were captured directly from the Vob files on the DVD as shown in my article in the December 2009 issue of Astronomy Now.

The various captured images were registered and stacked in 'Deep Sky Stacker' and then finally combined in Andrew Sprott's program 'Flexible Image Combine' to produce an image showing all parts of the Great Orion Nebula:

M42/43 Mintron image.

My talk to the Swansea Astronomical Society on February 25th will explore this aspect of astronomy in detail.

Member Keith Davies took the following images on Sunday 27th December 2009 from his dome in his back garden in Grovesend.

They were all taken through a Celestron 11” telescope. The Mars images through an Imaging Source DBK colour camera and the Moon shots through a DMK monochrome camera. The latter had a bigger pixel chip 1024x780. The seeing conditions were not great and then it clouded over. Around 25,000 frames were taken between both cameras.

Hopefully when Mars has its closest approach to Earth at the end of January the shots will have improved.

The first Mars image was taken through a 2x barlow and the latter a 3x barlow. As you can see a 3x was a little too much for the conditions.

With the Moon images the crater Copernicus was tried first with a 1.5x barlow, then a 2x barlow and lastly a 3x barlow. The last three images were taken with a .5 focal reducer attached to the DMK camera to give a wider field of view.