The Sun, The Moon, you name it!

Caught a quick glimpse of the Sun this afternoon and grabbed a photo of it:

Couple of big sun spots today. Again, according to maps of the Sun, the entire earth could easily fit into that spot on the left of the Sun. Wow!

Even the Moon made an appearance this evening. At about 8pm it was near Jupiter in the West:

Even though there wasn't much of the Moon showing, I still had to test out my 9mm and 15mm eyepieces on it and try to take a photo of it:

Oh, and I managed to see Saturn the other night! Got up at 5am for a leak (I'll spare you the details) and remembered that Saturn is about at that time (in the West) and sure enough, there it was! Not much detail to see, but I could see a small planet with those infamous rings around it. Amazing!

OMG! Some decent weather!

Since the sun was peeking out from some sparse clouds I decided to construct my solar filter. Every care should be made when making a solar filter. Great skill and passion went into making this technical feat of homemade ingenuity...

OK, so, it might have a rough edge here or there, but it works! Doesn't help that the sun is, at the moment, coming into view behind a whopping great tree then setting behind some houses, so there's not much space for taking photos, but I'll get some.

Even while the sun was setting good ol' Jupiter and Venus were showing. I managed to get some OK shots of Jupiter afcoally with my digital camera:

I doubt (Sir) Patrick Moore would wet himself over my photos, but I'm pretty chuffed with them.  :)

The Sun and the Moon

First I tried some sun projections which went OK, but couldn't get decent photos of them as I'm holding a piece of paper in one hand, camera phone in the other. Due to not being a contortionist I didn't get any decent photos of the projection, but I did (in the process) manage to partially screw up my phone's camera. I held the phone over the eye piece (on camera) to see where the sun was on screen, rather than blind myself. Doing this I think I've damaged the camera sensor in my phone. *sigh*  :(

In other (better) news: I noticed a clear sky this afternoon and took advantage of it to snap some new photos of the moon with my digital camera:

I think, with the digital camera, you need to use a larger eyepiece (25mm in my case) then tinker with the camera zoom to get a focus.

Either way, I think my scope needs collimating (calibrated) *dramatic music* as the slightest movement of the eye/camera and your left seeing shadows. Oh, and I also need to clean my eyepieces.

An astronomers lot is never a happy lot...  :D

Sunshine, my only sunshine...

Before leaving for work today I just had to point the telescope at the sun and blind myself project it's image onto a sheet of paper to photograph. If you look reeeeeeally closely you'll see a couple of sun spots:

If I ever get sunshine again I'll try again, but with a better set up.