Venus, Mars, Spica, the Moon and a UFO over Sydney

The western sky over Sydney last night had an excellent grouping of the moon, a couple of planets and a star. At the top we have a bright Venus. Below that a little bit is Mars. Moving down the photo roughly half way and a little below Mars, according to the excellent Astroblog, is Spica. Just above the tree at the bottom of the photo is the crescent moon.

The second photo is more exciting. I think I managed to capture a UFO*. It is just above the moon. It is a classic cigar shaped craft with what appears to be 5 bright lights. Shiiiit. Somebody call the media.


*Here endeth my attempted UFO hoax. It is just a plane taking off from the airport. The streak of light is what you get after a 4 second exposure (4 secs, ISO 80 and F2.8 at around 7pm).

Partial Lunar Eclipse from Sydney, Oz

Before I went to the footy tonight to see Collingwood belt Sydney, sigh, I was able to grab a picture of the moon. This was before the partial lunar eclipse due an hour or so later. I shot this photo through my Galileoscope with my Lumix Lx3. No special tricks or anything. I just pointed the telescope at the moon and raised the camera up to the eyepiece and fired away.
The photo was F/2.8, at 1/200 sec and ISO-80 and taken from Sydney at 5:47PM. I've flipped the photo to correct the inverted image from the telescope. Click the picture to embiggen.

Unfortunately the eclipse coincided with the annual blockbuster between Sydney and Collingwood out at the Olympic stadium. I probably should've stayed home and tried to get some proper shots of the eclipse because Collingwood smashed Sydney. I did manage to see the eclipse during the the quarter time and half time breaks and from the top of the car park after the game. Pity I didn't have my telescope with me. The picture below is about as good as I could get with a digital camera which only has a 65mm zoom. This photo had an aperture of F/2.8, a shutter speed of 1/500 sec and ISO-80 and taken from Sydney Olympic Park at 10:09PM. Click picture to embiggen.

Southern Cross image fixed.

Thanks to another suggestion from Ian at Astroblog I've re-done the photo of the Southern Cross. Instead of just stacking 3 images I've rotated each to match the rotation of the sky in between shots for a far better result.

A couple of shots of the Southern Cross from Beechworth

Before we went to Victoria a couple of weeks ago I'd been reading Ian Musgrave's Astroblog and he'd written a post about using The Gimp for astrophotography. The Gimp, or Gimp 2, is a free open source Photoshop. It does almost everything Photoshop does but it is free. I've been using Gimp for a while - it was my photo editor of choice for use on my little EeePC for our recent trip to Japan. Using a digital camera you can take multiple exposures of the sky and then stack them in Gimp to create a fairly decent astrophotograph. The stars are quite a bit brighter when stacked.

So armed with my trusty Lumix Lx3 and Gorilla Pod mini tripod I spent an hour or so on a freezing Beechworth night snapping the Milky Way.

For the images below I stacked 3 individual photos. Each of the exposure was around 30 to 40 seconds. As you can see there are some star trails around the edges of the photos. The sky rotates fast enough that a 30 or 40 second exposure creates quite a trail. Next time I'll do what Ian suggested and take a few more photos but limit the exposure to about 8 seconds.

But as a first attempt I'm pretty pleased. By the way the main constellation in both photos is the Southern Cross.

The Milky Way

After dinner tonight, which will be the next post, I was able to snap a few sky shots with my little digital camera (Lumix Lx3), I'll clean up more images and post them in a day or two but it isn't too shabby what can be snapped when you set and exposure for about a minute. I just had the camera on a small gorilla grip tripod resting on the roof my car. Below is a teaser. Hopefully I will be able to post a few more images in a few days. The little blob of red at the bottom of the picture is a tree and not some spectacular nebula. It is Winter here now but a few of the trees still have red and gold leaves hanging on.

Being out in the bush away from Sydney gives you a whole new perspective on the sky. The Milky Way arches right across the sky from horizon to horizon. Arms branch out from the main body of stars which look like fog. The blackness of the Coal Sack stands out. It can't be seen in Sydney. I am almost certain I could make out the Large Magellenic Cloud with the naked eye here. It is a really faint cloud. It would be impossible to see in Sydney.

Stars - mucking around after midnight

The smoke has cleared and, for Sydney, the sky is brilliantly clear. There are actually stars in the picture. Depends how bright your monitor is I suppose.
8 second exposure at F/2 and ISO-100.

400

Galileo's telescope is 400 years old today. Well, yesterday in Australia, but it is still the 25th somewhere in the world. Google's Doodle, the main Google logo, was even adapted for the day thus:

Yesterday we figured out how to use our replica Galileoscope properly, that is, in all its 50x power glory. The most we'd got out of it up to now was with 25x power. We can see Jupiter as a disk with a couple of very faint cloud bands visible now. I reckon it is amazing considering we're in the middle of Sydney with all that light pollution and last night was pretty hazy too. Awesomeness squared. I haven't been able to take any snapshots through the scope but other people have and if you click here you can see Jupiter pretty much how we see it except we can see the moons too.
There's a bunch more photos on Flickr here but I particularly like this one. And remember, they've all been shot through this US$15 telescope.

More Galileoscope

Michelle looking at Jupiter. Yes that is the entire boxed set of the UFO TV series on the shelf above her head.

The white dot is Jupiter taken through the scope with my mobile phone. The phone doesn't have the resolution to get the moons too but I'm pleasantly surprised to get Jupiter at all. All four big moons were visible tonight.

Galileoscope update

OMFG. It works. It really does. I really have no clue about celestial objects. I can point out the moon and the sun and I can find the Southern Cross in a pinch but I'd be flat finding one of the planets. So we decided to point the telescope at the brightest star we can see from our balcony in Sydney. It was really bright and rose in the east. It took a while to figure out how to focus the telescope. There is a tube the eyepiece sits in that slides in and out and once I was able to get it to slide easily it was not long before I managed to get something in focus.

I sighted up the bright star and I was able to get a white blob in the middle of eyepiece. I pushed the tube in and the blob shrank down to a bright point that had 3 other little pin pricks of light above and below it. It was fracking Jupiter. Holy humping guinea pigs. Jupiter with three of its moon in sharp focus. I was giggling like a school girl. Michelle reckons it was just like the picture on the box.

The picture isn't mine, it is something I snagged from the web. Unfortunately I don't know who owns it and I would give credit if I could. I've rotated the picture 90 degrees so it looks pretty much what I could see through the telescope. Awesome. I'm still grinning like some grinning thing. Thank you Galileo. Thank you Phil the Bad Astronomer and thank you Galileoscope.

Saturn next. Well it would be if it wasn't in an ordinary position at this time of year unfortunately.

Galileoscope

Well my Galileoscope arrived safe and sound. It came in the box as is and is pictured, for scale, next to some book I had lying around. For those out of the loop the Galileoscope is an initiative to create a low cost high quality kit to help promote the International Year of Astronomy. The Galileoscope is similar to Galileo's telescope... except it is plastic. Galileo's scope wasn't plastic. A scope can be picked up for a ridiculously low US$15 (AU$18) plus postage. Yes 15 bucks... I bought two.

Here's how it looks when you slip it out of the box. I hadn't read the fine print that mentioned something about being a "kit" and "easy to assemble" when I ordered it. D'oh.

The next step, assembly, is easy. You go to a Simon Singh lecture and you come home and, voila, your lovely better half has decided to put it together for you. She did struggle a bit with the instructions in the kit but if you click over to the Galileoscope downloads page here you can find better instructions (with pictures) in PDF form. We actually pulled it to bits again and reassembled it in a few minutes.

You can then pick it up and play pirates, aarrrghh, if you want to hand hold the thing and you can spy out stuff but it is like trying use a video camera when you're sprinting over an obstacle course. It works better if you pop it on a tripod. I'm using a fairly standard camera tripod with a video head. The telescope has a standard tripod nut mount thingy so it should fit any standard camera tripod.

First impression. Kewl. You focus by pulling the the tube with the eye piece in and out and that is a bit fiddly but it works. It was cloudy last night but I was able to point it between a slight gap in the clouds and I could see a star through the Galileoscope that I couldn't with the naked eye and that was pretty awesome. Can't wait for Moonrise, Saturnrise and Jupiterrise over the next few nights.