Sixty something years, boy, architect and old chuffer

The Pleiades in my Backyard

Had a a great Birthday Weekend! and a wonderful french supper tonight for a treat. Brancaster mussels cooked in white wine with added chopped parsley and home grown onions. Rustic french bread and butter with sea-salt crystals from the Camargue. A selection of soft and hard cheeses. A toffee apple and pecan pie with cream. A bottle of Sancerre Sauvignon Blanc. Coffee and cognac. Delicious!!!! Thanks for a fine day Toot!

Backyard Astronomer

Capella in Auriga

Last night and the night before Toot and I were out in the garden after midnight looking for Leonid meteors, sadly only a few were seen and none photographed. A meteor hunters life is often full of disappointment! On the plus side the night was good for star gazing subject to the restrictions of the light from a waning moon. I also managed to find on the Internet some excellent freeware astro-imaging software. Combine this with a large number of 20-second exposure light frames using my SLR with an EFS18-55mm lens add a little Photoshop etc. and voila a nice photograph of the constellation Auriga the Charioteer.Cabine du Jardin deux - Backyard Astronomer

Hide and seek Asteroids and Cassiopeia Queen of the Sky

Radar Image of Asteroid 2005 YU55- courtesy of NASA

Having returned from a brilliant holiday and clear skies in Canada and America, I hurried to set up my telescope in order to photograph the asteroid 2005 YU55 as it sped between the Moon and Earth at 29,000 mph.  At its nearest the asteroid passed only 239,000 miles from  the Earth. No other asteroid is known to come closer until the year 2028 ( By which time I will be eighty years old if still alive and snapping!). You can imagine how miffed I was when the clouds blew in off the sea and ruined any attempt to view, let alone image, the asteroid.

To cheer myself up I used Deep-sky Stacker, Photoshop and Neat Image, to enhance  photographs of the open star cluster Messier 39 in the constellation Cygnus which I took in September from garden with my Canon EOS 400D camera.

Messier 39