Four Planets At Once

May 8, 2022

I woke up early and went out onto the balcony to see whether or not it was cloudy. As you can see, there certainly were clouds, just not in front of the planets. It’s really hard to fetch a camera bag and a tripod when you need a walker. It’s even harder to set up the tripod when you have to sit down to do it, and hardest of all…

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Sunday photos: comet Neowise

Comet Neowise from jsut below Llano del Jable, El Paso
July 26, 2020

I finally got to see the comet! The plan was to go to El Llano del Jable, but I found cars parked solidly along the roadside for a kilometre or more before the viewpoint itself, so I settled for what I could get. Unfotunately I’d had to leave in a hurry and I found that I’d brought the wrong tripod. This one wouldn’t connect with the camera, so I wedged…

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Sunday photo: stars

December 1, 2019

I had a go photographing myself with stars. The trick is to have a long exposure for the stars (in this case, ISO 3200, 15 seconds, f4) plus a flash photo for me (or anything else you’d like in the foreground.) I set the flash to half power. If the person moves before the 20 seconds have finished, you might get stars and/or the horizon showing through. I want to…

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Photo of the week: the zodiacal light

October 16, 2018

It’s a funny thing, but the photos look very different on the desktop computer to the laptop – I hope this looks reasonable on your computer or phone.. You can only ever see the zodiacal light in really dark places, in the east about an hour before dawn, or in the west an hour after sunset. I took this photo from my balcony. It’s caused by dust in the plane…

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Photos of last week: The lunar eclipse

August 5, 2018

Better late than never, right? It’s now almost a year since I bought my new DSLR. The Pentax K 70 is supposed to be good for night photography, but I haven’t done nearly as much of it as I wanted. It seems like almost every night, either I’ve been exhausted, or I’ve had to get up early, or there’s been high clouds or Sahara dust. So I made an extra…

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Switching the stars on

April 22, 2018

I was quite worried about stargazing on Friday, because I was out of practice and the weather report was distinctly dodgy. Actually it all went well. I particularly enjoyed the little kids who were looking through a telescope for the first time. Witha bit of luck I set someone on their first steps to enjoying science. I was hoping to show people a crescent Venus (yes, it goes through phases…

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