21 today

We've had a friend visiting for the weekend, and she's into birds, so today we went to RSPB Minsmere.  It's a lovely place, many different habitats, well marked out routes around the site, and numerous hides to stop and watch all the many species of birds (and some other wildlife).  I saw 21 different species (mostly identified for me by my friend, including several I had never even heard of before):

• near the start around the shop and restaurant:
• robin 
• wood pigeon
• pheasant 
• large birds on the water: 
• greylag goose 
• mute swan 
• black headed gull (millions of them!)
• smaller birds on the water (mainly ducks, often in pairs)
• shoveler duck 
• teal 
• shelduck 
• garganey 
• gadwall 
• mallard 
• coot 
• waders
• avocet (about 10 of them standing in a neat row)
• oyster catcher 
• redshank 
• turnstone
• in the reed beds 
• little egret 
• heron 
• bittern 
• circling lazily above the reed beds
• marsh harrier (several of them)

50 years on

Today was Commem, and my year group's 50th anniversay of matriculation.  A group of us went along to to meet up, and see all the changes.

It was great to see old friends (with maybe not too much emphasis on the "old"), and how the buildings have changed, and not changed, over the years.  I was amused to find that my first year room has since been converted into ... a student kitchen.  (The student in the kitchen at the time was somewhat bemused to be descended upon by a group of old ladies :-)  

This specific change is somewhat ironic, given the amount of cooking I did at the time (zero).

round and round and round it goes

I saw a strange bent cloud out the window, and when I looked closer, it looked even stranger:

Strange that is, unless you've spotted the aeroplanes flying in circles in the sky around here, which is a common sight (even more common recently, for some reason...)  

I've never seen them leave circular con trails before, however.

seeing Uranus move

Last Wednesday, as well as getting a SeeStar photo of the Crab Nebula, we also took a picture of Uranus.

5 minute exposure : can you spot Uranus?

The problem is, Uranus looks like a star at the resolution of this telescope.  But, planets wander; it's there in the name.  So, we took another picture on Saturday, when we were also looking at the Orion Nebula.  Putting the two images side by side makes it clear which spot is the wandering planet, and which spots are the fixed stars.

 18 March, 5 minute exposure                                     21 March, 2 minute exposure

Blinking between the two images shows the movement well (but also shows that one image is very slightly rotated with respect to the other).

So how far across the sky does Uranus move in 3 days?  Well, its orbital period is 30,688.5 days, during which time it travels once round the sky, through 360 × 60 arc minutes.  In 3 days, it will therefore travel about one ten thousandth of this, or just over 2 arc minutes, or about 1/15th of the angular diameter of the moon.  So definitely enough to be visible.

M42 photo

 Another clear night tonight, another great SeeStar photo, this time of M42, the Orion Nebula.

3 minute integration, no post processing

The SeeStar takes several shots, and stacks them.  This 3 minute integration comprises a stack of 18 shots, each itself a 10 second exposure.

magnolia

The magnolia tree that had just started blossoming at the end of February a couple of days before meteorological spring, is now in spectacular full bloom, the day before astronomical spring (equinox).

M1 photo

Tonight was quite clear, so we played with the SeeStar telescope.

We got a nice picture of M1, the Crab Nebula.  You can even see colours!

10 minute integration, no post processing

We tried Jupiter, but it was over-exposed, even with the exposure turned down as much as we could.  We need to try playing with the settings a bit more.  We could see the moons, though.

A too-bright Jupiter and four moons. Must try harder.