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I spent 7 hours behind a monitor yesterday downloading SDO data of the Mercury transit every 15-minutes.

I put all the SDO data together to give this very short animation.

O.K. it looks like there is enough interest out there to make a start on this one 🙂

Please send your best image through to greg@newforestobservatory.com in jpeg format.  Please DO NOT send through a full resolution image, although it is fine if you supply the link to a full resolution image, I will post that up together with your low resolution image.  The maximum number of pixels along the longest side of your image should be less than or equal to 1500.

I won’t kick off the Astronomy Picture of the Day until there are enough images in the hard store to guarantee the thing won’t disappear for months on end just days after starting – so if you send an image in shortly – please be patient, it may be a while until it appears.

Get sending 🙂

This post is to give you an idea how your picture and your name (in lights) will appear if you submit an image to to AIOD.  Click on the image to see a larger version in a new window.

This image submitted by U.K. astro-imager Prof. Greg Parker shows us both of the twins in the same field of view.  The contrasting colours of Castor and Pollux make this 2-frame image more striking.  Image acquired using 2 x Canon 200mm prime lenses and 2 x Trius M26C 10-megapixel OSC CCDs on 10/02/2016.  Each frame was 1 and a half hour’s worth of 10-minute subs.  Image processed using Photoshop CS3 and Noel Carboni’s astronomy actions.

Over the New Forest Observatories this evening:

Beautiful clear Moonless night last night but we only get astronomical darkness starting around 11 p.m. so it’s a late start at this time of the year (and darkness ends around 3 p.m. so you don’t get many hours of darkness either).  I saw some nice contrasting red and blue stars in Draco using a planetarium program, and as a bonus I could also get NGC 4236 (Caldwell 3) in the frame as well – a barred spiral galaxy.  This image is 30 x 10-minute subs taken with the Sky 90 array on the mini-WASP.  When I packed up for the evening there was Saturn near Antares in the south, and quite high up in the sky there was Lyra and Cygnus, so summer is clearly not far away 🙂  All in all a superb night’s imaging.

Got today’s EPOD with an image of Spica (Akira fujii effect added) which is timely as Spica is right now crossing our southern horizon on these mild spring evenings.

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work 🙂