Stars / Astronomy / Astrophotography / Telescopes / Astro

I managed to take a few pics of the sky the other week in the Ardeche, in between rides up the local hills.

great photo, is the light source your bike light ?

The dumbbell nebula, with lots of sensor noise. When I am retired, I'll start playing with a guided mount, longer exposures and stacking multiple exposures.

^^Yes, a Hope Vision 1

The Scutum/Sagittarius bit of the milky way

Great photos, and so frikking jealous of the dark sky you have there.

Cheers Hovis - I just wish I was able to spend more time there. This was my first trip there since about 2008, and it's noticeable how much more light pollution there is now - look at those orange clouds. But a week there is worth more than a year of peering through London's murk.

I've never seen skies like that. Have tried a few times but always get caught out by clouds.

Do you eyes see what your pictures show or are the long exposures picking up more?

The first and last ones are not far off what it looks like with the naked eye, but the one with the bike light involves a bit of trickery - it's quite a long exposure but I only shone the light very briefly, but if you were to shine the light on a nearby tree you'd have difficulty seeing the stars.

I see. Again, jealous. I rode up with the missus to the old winchester hill back in july hoping to see a bit of galaxy but we were greeted with clouds and also some cretins have set up flood lights in the middle of the hill so not quite the dark spot it was advertised to be.

Hopefully some day.

Hubble Helps Find Smallest Known Galaxy Containing a Supermassive Black Hole

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/september/hubble-helps-find-smallest-known-galaxy-containing-a-supermassive-black-hole/#.VBqoUc9wbcf

Slightly off topic but related in some ways: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smashing-physics-the-lhc-and-the-higgs-boson-tickets-12895734489

Free lecture at UCL about Particle Physics and the LHC which UCL had some hand in building.

Wednesday 15th October...

Excellent pic of the moon/saturn conjunction taken from Londonhere. Bizarrely I happened to step outside that night and notice that there was a star which was strangely bright and visible despite being closre to the horizon. A quick look through some x8 binoculars made me think it was saturn because it looked elongated and google skymap confirmed it. Not many good stargazing experiences in London, but this was definitely one of them.

soo we're about to land on a comet, in 15 mins to be exact, here is a live blog from the guardian with a stream from ESA TV, the European space agency tv people:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/live/2014/nov/12/rosetta-comet-landing-live-blog#block-546335fce4b0058909044d94

is that the same feed as the bbc?

probably, esa are broadcasting an open media feed

So when do they expect to hear whether it was a success or not?

Seems like the live feed is mostly people waiting at the moment.

Okay, now there is a lots of hugging and clapping.

Woohoo! Just been watching the very undramatic stream...

Yeah, bit boring really, I want live video stream. The moon landing was a much better production. Shame on esa

Apparently a problem with the harpoons used to hold the spaceship to the comet, though the screws in the feet have activated so it should be able to hold on for a while.

Hmmm... Harpoon problems you say?

How are they going to deal with the Space Whale then?