On the 17th – 18th February 2014 there will be a joint Royal Photographic Society/Royal Astronomical Society meeting on Astroimaging.

Looks like this will be an interesting event.

Got today’s Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD) http://epod.usra.edu/ with the recent “12 brightest stars” montage I put together.

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work

Great news for the first day of 2014.

We are to be treated to another Starmus Festival on the island of Tenerife this September

Unfortunately we will not have Neil Armstrong joining us this time but there is a proposed tribute to Neil.

Starmus 2011 was simply the most stunning and the most inspirational meeting I have ever attended – and believe me I’ve been to a LOT of Conferences in my time.

I am sure that Garik will make Starmus 2014 at least as impressive as Starmus 2011 – if not more so!

I believe that recently Alan Turing has been pardoned.  Pardoned for what exactly?

Shouldn’t the Government of the day actually be asking for forgiveness of the Government of Turing’s day for the vicious chemical assault of Turing?

Let this be a warning to any scientist to NOT get involved in ANYTHING to do with the U.K. government whatever sexual preference you may have.

As it has been non-stop rain for days on end now, I have resorted to taking a look at old data.

Just put together all the datasets I could find of the Cygnus Wall region taken with the Hyperstar III and the M25C one shot colour camera.

You can see the result here:

Went into the garage and loaded up the pinhole camera tonight  All set and ready to go.  Will put it out tomorrow (one day early) and take it down on 22nd June (one day late) if I can keep my paws off it for that long.  Fingers crossed for a 6-month sub-exposure.

I am putting together a new pinhole camera for this coming December 21st 2013 (Winter Solstice).  It will remain outside recording whatever Sun there might be until June 21st 2014 (Summer Solstice).  Big difference from the earlier pinhole photographs I have taken though – this time I went and bought some 8 x 10 inch photopaper  Too big for the standard beer can – but a perfect fit in a 4-inch diameter piece of  plastic drainpipe.  A couple of layers of Aluminium foil around the pipe to ensure it is light-tight, and a couple of (black) watertight drainpipe end-caps to seal the ends against light and water.  The pinhole itself is made into a piece of Aluminium foil which is stuck over a 1″ diameter hole drilled into the side of the pipe.  So this goes out on Friday evening and I have a 6-month wait to see whether the idea has worked or not.  Check back on June 22nd for the answer

Beautiful clear Moonless sky last night and I took the last shots with the 200mm and M25C as I am so impressed by this lens that I will shift it to the mini-WASP top-plate and put an M26C on it.  This is just 6 x 15-minute subs taken using the wide field kit and I will of course return to this region next year.  However – results like this bode well for this winter’s goodies – provided the weather plays ball for a change.

I put together a little montage of the 3 brightest stars for those living in Northern latitudes.

You can see the image here.

Sirius, Arcturus and Vega to similar scales and total exposure times, so this is relatively how they look to one another in the night sky.

Got today’s Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD) with “Fibonacci Spirals in the Garden” - http://epod.usra.edu/

Thank you Jim for continuing to publish my work