Venus in the early evening sky

The Planet Venus as photographed from our back bedroom window
Planetary camera attached to a Meade ETX 90RA.
AVI video stacked using AutoStakkert and finished with APS
Taken at 5.00pm. on the 29th November 2013

Being rather disappointed by Comet ISON's apparent demise, I decided that some photo-astronomy was required to lift my spirits. Having never imaged Venus through a telescope, I decided to give it a go.

Unfortunately, our backyard is rather small and our house is surrounded on all sides by other houses.  As Venus never gets that high in the sky, photographing it using my large refractor is not an option.  The above image was shot through an upstairs bedroom window using my small 90mm ETX.

Venus is very bright, when my image was taken Venus was at magnitude -4.5 and had an illuminated phase of 32%, you would therefore think it might be easy to take a good photograph.  Because the Planet never gets very high above the horizon or far from the Sun, it presents real difficulties to the photographer. Thermal movement in our atmosphere causes the image through the eyepiece to distort and 'boil' so achieving steady focus is a 'devil' of a job.  The surface of Venus is a hellish place, no vegetation, bare rocks, lots of volcanos, extremely hot and at enormous pressure. The 'white' crescent shown in my image is visible thanks to sunlight being reflected off the dense blanket of carbon dioxide clouds which envelops the planet.  Looks quite beautiful from a distance but not so nice close to.  If it rains on Venus, it rains sulphuric acid!

Venus in the treetops

Credit base image:  

MG-Paris-Aphrodite of Milos.jpg -Wikipedia and mattgirling

Will you still need me?

'Cabine Dreams' of the young and foolish circa 1969

Birthday today!  I was given a copy of 'Fifty Sheds of Grey', great present for a shed enthusiast from S&S. Thank you!  Its a great read, particularly in a shed!

Comes with its own birthday quote:

                                                  'Happy Birthday', she said,
                                  placing a riding crop in my hand
                                  and lowering her skirt, 'Today's
                                  your lucky day'. I couldn't believe
                                  it- I was getting a pony!

Credits: Fifty Sheds of Grey

Droids and the like

St Luke's

Browsing the web today I came upon this excellent website r2 d2 translator:

http://www.r2d2translator.com/

Try out a few words, I spent a very happy ten minutes on this site.

Brilliant!!

Quotes from Yoda's Partner:

"Deaf you are"

"Drive you cannot, steer you must"

"The Force runs strong in your family, your mother's fault it is"

"Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, but  leave the lights on and large bills from EDF pay you must"

"You must unlearn what you have learned, for putting down the lavatory seat you cannot".

"When you look at the dark side careful you must be.  For the backside looks dark if wipe you cannot"

"A  Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defence, never for vacuuming the sitting room"

"Powerful you have become, the dark rum in you I sense"

 Credits: George Lucas

Ruddy Birds

Turnstones and Sandpiper seen on the breakwater
and a Curlew flew over our car as we headed for home.

Toot and I had an early start this morning . Whilst ATS swapped the tyres around on our car, we set off for a walk along the breakwater to the UK's most easterly location, Ness Point.

http://www.ness-point.co.uk/

The sun shone, the sea sparkled and we enjoyed an easy stroll along the breakwater wall.  We stopped to talk to two birdwatchers who were photographing birds from Ness Point. They pointed out the Turnstones and Purple Sandpiper which were feeding on the breakwater about 10 metres away from us.  Pretty little birds!

We picked up our car and as we were passing Lowestoft Lighthouse a Curlew flew over us.  How good was that?

Credits: Wikipedia and images by:

Purple Sandpiper - Andreas Trepte

Turnstone- Hans Hillewaert

Curlew- Alan D Wilson

Lowestoft Lighthouse-Stephen Craven

Swan Lake

Toot and I took our grandchildren, Felix and Maisy, to see Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' at the Theatre Royal Norwich. We all had a great time. If you haven't seen this performance you should, its excellent!

A great moral tale for our times!

As the great Stephen Stills once sang "If you can't be with the one you love, then love the swan you're with"

Credits: image Sadler's Wells

Winkles

Winkles lined up on my stick of celery

The winkle or periwinkle, when purged, boiled and cooled over night, makes for a great Sunday night tea.  One of my earliest memories is of sitting in a high-chair removing winkles from their shells, using a hat pin.   I can also remember, as a much older child, being sent with a ‘shilling’ to buy a pint of winkles from the ‘Shellfish man’  who would bring boiled shrimps, winkles, cockles and whelks from Herne Bay to Maidstone and stand outside the Bower Inn Public House at 1.00pm on Sundays. Nowadays, I buy my winkles ready frozen from ‘The World of Fish’ Lowestoft   Very nice they are too!   But no longer by the pint; in days gone by the fishmonger filled a pint beer mug with shellfish.  Today, a ‘shilling’ or ‘twelve old pence’ wouldn’t buy many winkles.   In current pounds sterling, the equivalent of a ‘shilling’ would be ‘five new pence’.   My frozen winkles, probably about half a pint, cost  two pounds and seventy pence (£2-70p).  Mind you when my Dad gave me a shilling for a pint of winkles, he was buying his first house for one thousand pounds (£1000).  The same house today would cost about two hundred thousand pounds (£200,000).

Winkles and celery go together like strawberries and cream, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or fish and chips.

I have collected my own winkles from the Thames Estuary at Southend on Sea, purged them of sand by leaving them overnight in a bucket of fresh water with a sprinkling of plain flour and then boiled them for ten minutes. They are very easy to collect from the foreshore but you must take them alive from  unpolluted sea water.  The Thames is now clean enough for winkles to be harvested.

The winkle is not often seen on menus in British restaurants but makes more frequent appearances in France and Belgium.  Well done you Europeans, come on you Brit Restaurateurs give winkles a chance!  Three cheers for Littorina Littorea - "They're real fishy"

My granddad George, who was a very good fishmonger, told me that God designed celery with  a horse-shoe cross section so you could line up winkles in the groove and they wouldn’t  fall out as you raised them to your mouth.

At one time winkles were so popular in Great Britain that a music hall song was written about them  with the rousing chorus:

Oh, I can't get my winkle out. Isn't it a sin?
The more I try to get it out, the further it goes in.
I can't get my winkle out. Isn't it a doer?
I can't get my winkle out. Has anybody got a skewer?

For a more modern version of 'The Winkle Song' from 1986 follow the link:

https://myspace.com/gardenofengland/video/the-winkle-song-i-can-t-get-my-winkle-out-comedy-/53015419

Credits: Wikimedia for the winkle shell image,  Old Grizzly on  Mudcat Cafe  mudcat.org Lyr Req: for the chorus lyrics and Paul Carr for the Winkle Song.

It was a dark and stormy night

The Moon and the planet Jupiter.
Composite of images taken with a tripod mounted
Canon 600D DSLR with EOS 90-300mm telephoto lens at 300mm,
from our backyard just before midnight on the 21st November 2013

Last night, Jupiter and its retinue of Galilean Moons came within 6 degrees of our Moon. The weather has been wet, cold and windy for several days, but last night the clouds parted to afford a brief glimpse of the gibbous Moon and Jupiter the largest planet in our solar system.  Our Moon is much closer than Jupiter and so looks much larger.  In reality our Moon is comparable in size with Jupiter's moons which can just be seen in my photograph as star-like dots on each side of Jupiter's disc.

If you turn binoculars on Jupiter (shining very bright in the constellation Gemini) you will be able to see Jupiter's big four moons all lined up. If you follow Jupiter from night to night you will be able to see the moons change position as they orbit the planet.

Outraged of Oulton Broad Part3

First Light - Comet C/2012 S1 ISON

Photographed at 5.30am  on the 10th of November
using a tripod mounted Canon 600D DSLR with a
Canon EOS telephoto lens at focal length f = 90mm
(11x5 sec light exposures at ISO 1600 stacked with flats and darks using DeepSkyStacker and finished using APS). 

Enlarged area in vicinity of comet

Sky map showing position of comet
 in the constellation Virgo this morning at 5.30 am.

Well this was the second morning this week that I got up at 4.00am.  Success on my second attempt at catching a very few photons from Comet C/2012 S1 ISON as it hurtled towards the Sun at 105,000 mph and accelerating. This morning the comet was approximately 91 million miles distant from Earth and 70 million miles away from the Sun. It will have its closest encounter with the Sun (perihelion) on the 28th of November. Lets hope it gets a lot brighter and sports a long tail!
For live feed follow link:
http://www.cometison2013.co.uk/perihelion-and-distance/

I took the photographs from a vantage point on Pakefield Cliff looking out over the North Sea.  I must say it was jolly cold and I needed some tea and thawing out when I got back home at about 6.30 am. A bonus was a fine view of the planet Mercury rising above a bank of clouds on the the horizon.

Mercury shines bright over a calm North Sea
Ship or gas platform lights can be seen on the horizon.

For a brilliant animation, by a UK amateur astronomer, of the International Space Station passing in front of Comet ISON  follow link:
http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/199496-iss-passing-comet-ison/

For fantastic images:
http://www.damianpeach.com/ison.htm

NASA, Stereo spacecraft, video of Comet ISON incoming to meet the Sun:
http://www.space.com/23752-best-yet-comet-ison-footage-from-stereo-released-video.html

Update 29th November 2013: Comet ISON RIP (ripped into pieces)

Since the morning of the 10th November, the weather in Lowestoft has been very poor and consequently, I have been unable to capture any further images of the comet on its inward journey towards the Sun.  Sadly, it would appear that the comet nucleus has broken into pieces as it passed around the Sun.  Yesterday, the comet, travelling in excess of 800,000 mph., came within 2 million kilometers of the Sun's photosphere and was subjected to both excessive heating and gravitational forces. Bearing in mind that the nucleus of a comet has a rather variable aggregate composition of dust and ice, the ability of each and every comet to survive an encounter with the Sun is generally unknown until the event occurs.  Sun grazing comets like Comet ISON, as they pass so close to the Sun, are particularly vulnerable to disintegration.  There is however, some hope that at least one large fragment of the nucleus has survived and may yet become visible as a very faint object in our skies.  I really hope so and if so I shall be out at dawn to try to photograph it!

Comet C/2012 S1 ISON's Grand Finale
as seen by the SOHO satellite

To see more of the comet's final approach to the Sun follow link:
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011400/a011422/index.html

Credits: NASA ESA & NASA/SOHO/SDO , Base Map by SkyMap Pro and Toot for getting me up and making breakfast and lunch - what a star!

Gastronomy Taxonomy

Chicken with apples and pecan nuts
 in a stilton cheese and cream sauce,
'50% Swaffle' and '50% Gromff'

My son William reminded me that my old friend, Dave 'Wiz' Ward from Halifax, classified all food on his plate by the relative proportion of  'Swaffle' and 'Gromff.'   It was Dave's contention that a good meal required a balance of 'Swaffle' and 'Gromff'.  Theoretically, a cream soup is all 'Swaffle' and requires the addition of crunchy croutons to provide the missing 'Gromff''.  

The concept is quite subtle in that some consumable ingredients are inherently swaffley, some are inherently gromffy and some are transcendental, moving between these mutually exclusive states of gastronomic being in response to the application of the chef's skills. For example; milk is inherently swaffley, it can be made thicker by churning to create cream, butter or cheese but essentially its still swaffley. You could freeze it to make a milk-ice lolly but give it a suck and you are still talking 'Swaffle'. Similarly; celery is inherently gromffy.  I suppose you could cook it forever and make a fancy celery puree. Excessive cooking and maceration might make it less gromffy but I believe that with celery, however rendered, there will always remain a faint echo of 'Gromff' on the palate.  Potatoes on the other hand are fully transcendental on both plate and palate.  Mash, broken potato, boiled, baked, roast, waffled, chipped and crisped represent the full  potato spectra from 'Far Infra-Swaffle' to 'Far Ultra-Gromff'.  No wonder potatoes are considered 'waffley' versatile and a British staple food!

The Pleiades

The Pleiades as photographed from our backyard
 at 1.30am on the 5th of November 2013. Taken with
 a Canon 600D DSLR and EOS telescopic lens at focal
    length 300mm, on a NEQ6 Pro driven equatorial mount .

The Pleiades, Messier 45, Melotte 22 or the 'Seven Sisters' is a relatively bright open cluster of gravitationally bound stars which are easily seen with the naked eye.  As a consequence of their visibility, the stars of the Pleiades are the subject of folklore for diverse cultures.  In many tales the stars represent seven sisters, who pursued by any number of different antagonists, group together for flight or fight. The earliest reference to this asterism is ascribed to the Bronze Age.

The Pleiades are located within the constellation, Taurus the Bull and contain over 1000 stars although many are thought to be low mass brown dwarf stars. The brighter stars are relatively young, approximately 100 million years old, and are hot B type stars. The stars,135 parsecs distant, are gravitationally bound and moving across the sky with the same proper motion towards the constellation Orion the Hunter.  The cluster is currently moving through a particularly dusty part of the interstellar medium and radiation from the cluster's hot stars is being reflected off the dust creating a blue reflection nebula which can be seen in my long exposure photographs.

You will not be able to see the nebulosity with the naked eye or for that matter  with binoculars or a small telescope but you can see the beautiful blue white stars.  A young person with good eyesight should be able to count all nine of the brighter stars and maybe a few more. The view through binoculars or a small telescope is breathtaking!  My first look at the night sky, at the age of ten years, through a  toy telescope, was my first adventure into stargazing.  So, on the next clear night, why not go out and take a look at the 'Seven sisters'? The light from these stars has been travelling for between 390 and 460 years so it would be a shame to waste any of the photons!

How come there are nine bright named stars and only seven sisters?  Well Pleione and Atlas were mum and dad to Alcyone, Sterope, Maia, Taygeta, Caleano, Electra and Merope!

Annotated version of my image of the 'Seven Sisters'

Pleiades bright stars

Name	Pronunciation (IPA & respelling)	Designation	Apparent magnitude	Stellar classification
Alcyone	/ælˈsaɪ.əniː/ al-sy-ə-nee	Eta (25) Tauri	2.86	B7IIIe
Atlas	/ˈætləs/ at-ləs	27 Tauri	3.62	B8III
Electra	/ɨˈlɛktrə/ i-lek-trə	17 Tauri	3.70	B6IIIe
Maia	/ˈmeɪə/, /ˈmaɪə/ may-ə, my-ə	20 Tauri	3.86	B7III
Merope	/ˈmɛrəpiː/ merr-ə-pee	23 Tauri	4.17	B6IVev
Taygeta	/teɪˈɪdʒɨtə/ tay-ij-i-tə	19 Tauri	4.29	B6V
Pleione	/ˈplaɪ.əniː/ ply-ə-nee	28 (BU) Tauri	5.09 (var.)	B8IVpe
Celaeno	/sɨˈliːnoʊ/ sə-lee-noh	16 Tauri	5.44	B7IV
Sterope, Asterope	/ˈstɛrɵpiː/, /əˈstɛrɵpiː/ (ə)-sterr-ə-pee	21 and 22 Tauri	5.64;6.41	B8Ve/B9V
—	—	18 Tauri	5.65	B8V

Credits: SkyMap Pro for base map and Wikipedia