Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Nick James
ParticipantExcellent images Tony. This is turning out to be a really nice comet.
Nick James
ParticipantIt may not match the wonderful images taken from further south but 45P is definitely available from the UK if you have a decent horizon. Here is my image taken from Middle Hope, Somerset, tonight. It was a glorious clear sunset so I climbed to the top of this headland in the Bristol Channel and set up my Canon 550D and Star Adventurer mount. The sky finally got dark enough around 1800 UT when the comet was around 5 deg above a sea horizon. If you use your imagination the comet has a tail of rather more than half a degree in the image.
Nick James
ParticipantGerald Rhemann’s latest image of this comet is here. This was taken from the very dark skies of Farm Tivoli, Namibia with the comet around 13 degress above the western horizon, just before astronomical twilight ended. I haven’t seen any images or visual reports from the UK yet but the comet is a very difficult target in the twilight. From southern England at 17:15 UT tonight the Sun is 12 degrees below the horizon and the comet is only 8 deg up, to the right of Venus and about half the altitude. If you have a clear western horizon it’s worth trying some DSLR shots to see if you can pick this comet up at around 8th magnitude.
Nick James
ParticipantMartin’s description of the prospects for this comet is here. It will certainly be a challenge to observe it from the UK in early January but it will be a popular target for remote scopes.
Nick James
ParticipantThanks Paul. And Happy Xmas from the Director of the Comet Section too. Let’s hope for clear skies and lots of comets in 2017.
Nick James
ParticipantExcellent Richard. Will you be willing to give a talk on your 29P work and outbursting comets in general?
Nick James
ParticipantOf course I’ll come to your VSS meeting at Winchester as long as I can sit at the back…
Nick James
ParticipantHere’s a picture of Roy taken at the 2013 May Comet Section meeting (by David Storey I think). There was indeed a standing ovation. Here is a link to an audio recording of Denis introducing Roy to that meeting.
Nick James
ParticipantVery sad news. I received this at the B2B in Chichester yesterday after talking about comets and 67P in particular. I’ve put a news item on the comet page.
Nick James
ParticipantTony,
Unfortunately, as Hazel says in her email, UCL told us in August that we couldn’t use their large lecture theatre and it wasn’t possible to find a viable alternative in central London for this year’s Christmas Meeting. We are all very frustrated about this since the Christmas Meeting is always very popular. I know it is not the same but we hope to get the meeting video out as soon as possible afterwards for those that cannot attend.
Nick.
Nick James
ParticipantNice pics. Good use of a golf course!
Nick James
ParticipantThe 550D CR2 raw format is indeed 14-bits per pixel (i.e. 0 – 16384) but the processing for extracting the green channel from the two green pixels of Bayer colour array adds an arbitrary scaling probably due to the interpolation required. A simple scaling doesn’t really matter since you do the photometric calibration after extracting the green channel.
Most of the non-Canon software in use uses functions based on dcraw to do this coversion so you can have a look at the source code if you are interested!
Nick James
ParticipantAn interesting and rather depressing read.
Nick James
ParticipantNice image. It just goes to show that there is always something interesting going on in H-alpha even when there are no white-light spots.
Nick James
ParticipantThanks Dominic for doing this so quickly and thanks to everyone who provided material. The video thumbnail shows a frame from one of Mattias Malmer’s amazing 67P shape model videos. There are a lot more examples on his home page here.
Nick James
ParticipantGlad you enjoyed the meeting and the pub afterwards. For people who couldn’t make it we’ve recorded the projector video stream courtesy of a box that Dominic Ford found so we should be able to get it up on the site more quickly than before.
Nick James
ParticipantJames, Looks like you had a really good view from the north of Scotland. This 1700 UTC Eumetsat image just shows how much of a north-south divide there was.
Nick James
ParticipantPete – Very nice pics as usual. Paul’s garden must have been stuffed with ‘scopes!
Nick James
ParticipantThat’s really nice David. I had wondered about the plot on Xavier’s page. Great to see that it really was like that!
Nick James
ParticipantThanks for all the images. It’s good to see that the transit was well seen around the country. I’ll be using these in my Sky Notes at the BAA meeting on the 25th.
I’ve made a small composite of frames I shot at ingress. These were the best single frames that I could find in a video which redefines the term “atrocious seeing!”.
Nick.
-
AuthorPosts