eclipse time

We debated whther to go to Spain or Iceland to see today's total eclipse of the sun, but in the end remained at home, to see the 96% eclipse visible from here.

We scoped out yesterday where would be a good place to view from.  As it is late afternoon/early evening, it turns out that it's not quite visible from our garden: just too low.  But it is visible from just across the road.  So we set up a viewing station on the pavement there, with just five instruments this time.

The carboard telescope we got for the 1999 total eclipse; the solar binoculars with built in filters; the SeeStar telescope with its solar filter; a collander, and a bottle of water (not a viewing instrument, but needed because, despite being early evening, it was hot).  Not shown: a pair of solar viewing glasses.

Because we were out in public, there were several passers-by.  We encouraged them to look through the binoculars, first explaining that these were special safe ones, and they should never use ordinary binoculars.  We spent a lot of time looking through them ourselves. Definitely a good investment.

The cardboard telescope produced its usual slightly fuzzy result.

And the collader produced an array of slightly fuzzy images.

It took a bit of adjusting to get the collander at the right distance for good images.  The holes are probably a bit too big.

But by far the best images are from the SeeStar.  It was a bit tricky to use, as we needed to view the tablet to set it up and capture images.  And since the sun was very bright, the screen was hard to see.  But we got a lot of great images from it anyway.

colour and size changes are due to fiddling with the telescope controls

The day did get noticeably cooler, and a bit dimmer, close to maximum.

So a good eclipse experience.  But we know it's nothing like the experience of a total one.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLXII

The latest batch. (I'm trying to do these posts before the batches get too big, which means they are more frequent.)

tubular woes

The second day of Astrofest was as good as the first (better, taking into account I had significantly more sleep last night than the night before!)

Today we heard about: 

• ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter mission and its view of the solar poles
• Searching for micrometeorites in piles of dust
• ESA’s Science programme in general
• An interview with Gary Hunt on his 50 years in space science, including his Voyager experiences
• Interstellar magnetic fields, including a description of how the Pillars of Creation ‘fingers’ are pointing at the star forming area, with shock waves from star production pushing on the material, bending magnetic fields to form the fingers
• J-P Metsavainio’s stunning astrophotography, including a mind-blowingly detailed image of the Milky Way (zooming in to which showed lots more ‘fingers’ pointing at star formation)
• How large telescope mirrors are made
• NASA’s Psyche mission to a metal asteroid

Excellent!

Usually, at the end of the Saturday of Astrofest, we dash off to catch a train home from Kings Cross.  But it's always a rush, and the train is always packed.  This year we decided to do something different: go back to the hotel, have dinner, then proceed more leisurely to Kings Cross for a later, hopefully less full, train.

On buying tickets, we discovered there were no trains home from Kings Cross that night, due to engineering works.  The app suggested a cross country route, but we decided to travel via Liverpool Street instead.  Slower than the Kings Cross train, but not slower than the cross-country route, and on a direct tube line from High St Kensington.

So, we had dinner, collected our luggage, and proceeded to the tube station.  Only to be regaled with announcements that there severe delays on the Circle Line.  There were complicated instructions of what to do, but we instead took the District line to Earl’s Court, then the Piccadilly line to Holborn, then the Central line to Liverpool St.  So, not direct, but we did catch the main line train we had been aiming for, although with slightly less leeway than we had hoped!  We arrived home not too late, well fed, and full of great astronomy.  So we’ll probably try that approach again next year (well, eating first, not the grand tour of the underground, hopefully).

view from a London hotel window

I had a very productive and enjoyable time at the ALICE workshop in Copenhagen, working with a great team, modifying and using a system that modifies its own programming language.  We hope to get a paper out of it.  Watch this space!

Unfortunately, the last day of the Workshop clashed with a prior engagement in London: Astrofest 2026.  So I left Copenhagen on the last flight out on Thursday evening.  I knew this was a risky decision at the best of times, and then it started snowing...

The flight was delayed by two hours.

In the queue to board.  Brrr.

That meant I missed the last train from Stansted to London.  Saved by National Express!  I got a coach to Paddington.  I felt very 21st Century as I sat on the coach and used my Greater Anglia app on my phone to cancel my rail ticket and request a refund, for which I was charged £5.

I got to Paddington after 2am: the tube was shut, and there were no taxis.  I downloaded a taxi app (not Uber), and summoned a black cab.  That took me to my hotel off Kensington High Street (and cost more than my coach fare from Stansted).  

I arrived at 3am (4am Copenhagen time), but I arrived.  Five hours sleep, then breakfast (and a photo out of the window) ready for a day of astronomy talks.  

no snow!

The talks were very good, covering the JUICE mission, the Herschel telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (and its relationship to K-Pop; yes, really!), landscape astrophotography (marvellous photos), the history of Guillaume Le Gentil's tragi-comic failure to witness two transits of Venus, and galaxies in 3D (I thought the Hubble Deep field photos were mind-blowing enough; seeing them in 3D takes that experience to another level).

Well worth the travel hassle.  And more tomorrow!

sequestering carbon, one Christmas at a time XIII

His'n'hers Christmas presents (including a DVD, for a change)

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLIII

The latest batch, comprising his'n'hers birthday presents.

Eight ways to observe the eclipse

We watched the partial solar eclipse quite closely this morning, with eight different instruments.

Going counterclockwise, we have:

1. A pair of solar viewing glasses from the 1999 total eclipse.
2. The SeeStar telescope with a solar filter.
3. The new solar binoculars.
4. The digital SLR with zoom lens, and, of course, solar filter.
5. The cardboard solar projector telescope, bought for the 1999 eclipse
6. The 5" Meade telescope with, you guessed it, a solar filter.

We used all the instruments, but the 5" gave the best view, and the SeeStar got the best pictures, overall.

Just starting: see the big sunspot near the limb. 
There are some smaller, fainter spots towards the top-middle of the disc.

Near maximum, and the smaller sunspots are close to the edge of the moon.

Nearly over

I snapped the sky with my phone to show that it was getting somewhat cloudy. 

The sun is completely overexposed, of course.  But wait. What's that spot on the dome?  (In case you are wondering, we couldn't use the 8" telescope in the dome for this event, as we don't have a solar filter for it.)

Look at that reflection!

So that's the seventh way we could see the eclipse (although we didn't notice it at the time, only when looking at this photo).  

What about the eighth?  Well, that's the same as the way we "observed" a partial eclipse 10 years ago, with our solar PV:

The big dip: that's no cloud, that's the (partial) eclipse)

The device to attach a phone camera to the 5" telescope arrived in the post later in the afternoon.  Oh well.  In any case, a well observed eclipse.

four or five planet evening

Clear skies, cold still weather: good seeing.  So, about half past six this evening, we looked for the planetary alignment.  We saw (with the naked eye) faint Mercury close to the still faintly pink horizon, spectacular Venus dominating the western sky, bright Jupiter near the zenith, and red red Mars a little further round.  Binoculars made them brighter, but still point like, except for Venus.  I could convince myself I could see Venus’ phase, but it was so bright, it was hard to be sure.

Later, 8:30-9pm, it was much darker, and we used the big telescope.  Venus and Mercury had set by then.  Jupiter was lower down, but still visible: we could see all four Galilean moons, and some dark bands on the planet itself.  Mars by then had moved close to the zenith.  Last time we tried to view it at that angle, we couldn’t see through the finder, so we bought a 90 degree adapter for it at AstroFest a few weeks ago.  It works!  We got to see the red planet as a disc.  Beautiful.

We had a quick look at the Pleiades, as they were in the vicinity.  My god, it’s full of stars!

We then used the autofinder to try for Uranus.  We could see a bright object near the centre of the field of view.  It could have been a very small disc of a planet, or just a point source of a star.  I choose to believe it was Uranus.

So, definitely four planets, and maybe even five.

new toy

AstroFest has a lot of exhibitors.  Last year we bought a small SeeStar telescope, and a dome for the big telescope we bought back in 2020.  This year we were a little more restrained.  

We had recently been looking at Jupiter with the big telescope; we had also tried for Mars.  But Mars is high in the sky at the moment, which means the telescope is almost vertical.  We have a 90 degree adaptor for the eye piece, but not for the finder scope.  It was too difficult to limbo down to look up through the finder, so we didn't see Mars.  Thanks to this year's AstroFest, we now have a 90 degree adaptor for the finder, too.

A quarter of a century ago, August 1999, we viewed the total eclipse of the sun.  For that, we bought a Lightline Solar Projector, a clever cardboard tube and lens contraption that allowed us to project an image.  We have been using it since to view the sun, but it's not particularly good for seeing sunspots, and is getting a bit battered.  We have a solar filter for the new SeeStar telescope, which gives us a spectacular view, but takes a while to set up.  While wandering around the exhibits, I saw a variety of "solar binoculars", binoculars with built-in solar filters, so they can be used to directly view the sun (and nothing else!)  I was debating whether to get a pair, when one of the other attendees struck up a conversation.  She said she had bought a pair previously, and had spent many a happy time watching the sun.  She convinced me, so I bought a pair.

The weather forecast is cloudy for the next week.  So I'll have to wait to try them out!

view from a hotel window

Another year, another AstroFest.  We stayed at a different hotel this year (next door to the previous one), in the hope it would be quieter: it was!  But the view wasn't quite as interesting:

Two days of fascinating talks again, on aurorae (the ones last year were some of the most southerly viewable ever), Mars, forthcoming eclipses, astrophotography (the quality of "amateur" photography today is streets ahead of professional photography several decades ago), black holes, observatories on the moon, star surveys, the UK Space Agency, star formation, the Antikythera Mechanism, exoplanets, and Enceladus.  Something for everyone.

And the exhibitors had bigger than ever telescopes on offer, including one mount with four large telescopes on it!  A bit beyond our budget, but nevertheless, the shape of amateur things to come?

The train down (Thursday afternoon) was 12 nearly empty coaches.  The train back (Saturday evening) was eight packed coaches: we had to stand.  Two different people offered me their seat: I must look older than I think I do!  I politely (I hope) declined: I had after all been sitting down all day at the event.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLVIII

 The latest batch:

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLVI

If you follow my book reviews over on my website, you may have noticed several reviews for Great Courses lecture series.  Each course is 12-48 lectures, on DVD, accompanied by a coursebook.  These make great watching while, say, eating lunch.  We wait until interesting courses are on special offer, and have watched many of these, from science and economics to literature and history.

Recently, Great Courses decided to discontinue several of their DVDs, leaving only streaming options.  We dislike this, so have bought up a load of cheap courses while they are still available.  These should last us a while!

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLV

I am beginning to catch up with my book databasing backlog.  Here's the batch from the end of October.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLIV

These are some books we bought in York on the way home from our Scottish holiday in August, some undatabased books I discovered when I packed up my office in October, plus a few maths books related to a potential retirement project I'm thinking about.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLIII

Our Edinburgh bookshops purchases: (yes, I am very behind in databasing new books, but hoping to catch up soon!)

Amusingly, on that one morning we bought two different books, in two different bookshops, by two different Daniel Chandlers.  Neither appears to have a disambiguating middle name.

spotty

We haven't managed to see the allegedly spectacular Northern Lights; it's been too cloudy at night.  But during the daytime, we've been able to see the cause.

oodles of sunspots, seen using our SeeStar telescope with a solar filter

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLII

 Our Inverness bookshop purchases:

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLI

While the birthday presents were accumulating, other books not slated to be birthday presents were also accumulating.  Here's that batch:

No, the 43 Visions for Complexity book isn't upside-down.  It just has the title on the spine running upwards, rather than downwards.  I know this is more traditional in other languages, but it makes the bookshelf annoyingly inconsistent when it's done in English-language books.

SeeStar, a very close one

Today was a beautifully sunny day, and we have a solar filter for our new telescope.  So we played with it again, after lunch

look at all those sunspots! no wonder there was a great aurora (even if we didn't see it)

zoom x2, and the spots' penumbrae are more visible

zoom x4, maximum zoom

The main problem with all this that the day was so sunny and bright, it was next to impossible to see the phone screen, so it was hard to set things up, or see the results.  But that's not an insurmountable issue: there are places in the shade.

So yes, we are very happy with our new toy!

SeeStar, or rather see moon and galaxies

Last night we finally had a night clear enough (although still somewhat hazy) to have a play with our latest telescope.

It's computer controlled, and calibrates its position automagically, presumably using GPS to get everything it needs.  It has a range of preprogrammed things to look at, and can autotrack (this is cheating, really, but great fun!).

First, of course, is to have a look at the crescent moon.  Everything is controlled through a phone app, including taking pictures of what it sees.  So here's a screenshot:

lovely craters along the terminator

We then moved on to looking at some galaxies.  M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, is always an interesting view.

When we first looked at the phone screen, there was very little to see.  But this image is after integrating the view for 5 minutes.  Nothing seen here was visible with the naked eye: the Plough could be seen through the faint haze, but not much more.  This is really impressive.  Also, there is a satellite track across the image, visible early on in the integration, but here integrated away by the time we took this one.

We're looking forward to a properly clear night, when we should get much better images.  And we'll need to get a tablet for better pictures, too!