heatwave number 4

There are so many things wrong with this picture (phone screenshot):

1. It is a quarter to 9 at night, and yet it's still 30°C
2. It's going to be max 26°C tomorrow (so still heatwave temperatures)
3. It was max 33°C today (deduced, because 26+7 = 33; it got to 35°C not far away)
4. The idea that it is going to be colder tomorrow (rather than maybe "cooler" or "less ridiculously hot")

stacking up

I thought yesterday's SeeStar shot of the moon was good.

But my other half also took a SeeStar video of it.  Why would you take a video of a static scene?  To enhance the view.  He spent today fiddling around with AutoStakkert!, software to stack multiple frames to get a better image.  The result is great, much crisper:

Why not just use the SeeStar to integrate over a longer time, like with other images?  Well, it doesn't do that for solar system objects, so we just have to try harder.

He also played around with a solar video taken at the end of May.  Here's a simple image:

2026/05/29, 17:48 BST

And here's the result of processing the video, with much more detail visible on the sunspots:

and yet it rotates

 Two pictures of a spotty sun, taken roughly 24 hours apart.

2026-05-29 16:48 GMT

2026-05-30 15:10 GMT

Look closely, and you can see that the spots have the same pattern, but have moved.  The sun rotates!

No matter how much we improve our ability to take photographs through our telescopes, we will never achieve anything to rival this amazing video, taken in October 2014 from NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory:

spots and birds

The sun is very spotty today.

15:54 GMT, taken with out SeeStar telescope with solar filter

The SeeStar allows us to take videos.  The sundoesn't change much, but a short video showed something rather fun.

Blink, and you might miss them.  Here's a still frame:

16:29 GMT.  Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It's ... a bird.

(The wobbly shadow at the bottom is a tree.)

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).

differently spotty

The sun is still remarkably spotty, but rotation since Friday has changed the view:

spotty

"You want to look at the sun!" my other half yelled.  I went out with the solar binoculars, and saw many large spots.  Wow.  "Can we take photos of it with the SeeStar?"

About an hour later, after installing the solar filter, levelling the system, uploading new firmware, levelling it again, rebooting telescope and tablet a few time, and lots of muttering: a SeeStar picture!

click to embiggen

Wow!  Multiple spots. Pairs of spots. A cluster of spots.  A row of spots. A ring of spots!

Through the binoculars I could see the five big spots plus a splodge where the ring is.  But this picture is something else.

reflections

The early morning sun, bouncing off the car window, passing through the bushes, in through the house front window, and landing on the side wall.  All looking very artistic.  (Pity about the central heating thermostat.)

escaping the heat

It was a lovely morning to be sitting on a quiet railway platform, listening to the birds singing, waiting for the train that would take me from the developing heat in the south (forecast mid 30s) to the more civilised levels in Glasgow (forecast, low 20s). 

8:46 am BST; already warm

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.

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!

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

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!

Nakajima Park

My flight home today is a late evening one, so I had most of the day to kill first.  I had a look at a map, and decided to visit Nakajima Park, a few stops south on the metro from my hotel.

One reason I chose the park is the map showed it contains Sapporo City Observatory.

Aha! I spied an open door!  I walked up to it, and yes, it was open for viewing.  Not only that, but the telescope was configured to see the sun.  A Japanese gentleman welcomed me in, and indicated I should take a look.  It was a great view of a quite spotty sun.  Then he pointed to another eyepiece.  This had another filter enabling me to see several prominences.  Once he realised I knew what I was looking at, we had a nice little conversation about the telescope and some pictures on the wall taken with it.

After that pleasant interlude I continued my walk around the park.  There were many good views across the lake.

And there were more formal garden arrangements.

this must look magnificent when the wisteria is in bloom

It was very hot, so I found an ice cream place, and sat enjoying it, while being regaled with 1970s pop music.  Then, of course, I needed to find a public convenience.  I had discovered there are two styles: the over-the-top luxurious loos with heated seats and built in everything, and the holes in the ground.  The park had only the more primitive option.

the romance of travel

Then it was time for lunch, then back to the hotel to talk about neuromorphic computing with another colleague over iced coffee.

Ready to fly home tonight.

shepherds are delighted

looking NW, at 20:02BST

 

view from a hotel window

I travelled down to Kensington from York last night, staying at a hotel near the AstroFest event.

view from the (very grubby) hotel window

a more downward view, explaining the noise

I attended only today’s talks this year (as I had to work yesterday); they were all fascinating as usual.  This year we had people watching out for asteroids that might impact Earth, solar flares, that image of a black hole, ESA missions, Hubble and art, the history of the Royal Astronomical Society, a mission to an as yet unknown comet, and the next 200 years of astronomy. The Director General of ESA has the most wonderful sense of humour!

And, after having been talking about it for several years, we finally bought a new, bigger telescope, to be delivered next week.

chimneys in the sun

The setting sun lit up a line of golden chimneys:

View of sunlit chimneys, 21:16 BST.  They are not normally golden, but are “white” brick, which reflects more than the red.

View in the other direction, of the sunset lighting up the chimneys, 21:18 BST