Galileo's Camera

I was going to wait till I get a good shot of Mercury before I posted this. But it is unlikely that I would be able to do stargazing in the next few weeks, so decided to put up what I managed to capture yesterday and today. Venus - 25th Jan 2014 Mars - 26th Jan 2014 Jupiter - 26th Jan 2014 Saturn - 26th Jan 2014 All the images were taken using Canon 550D's Movie Crop mode, exporting the file as a avi in Canon ZoomBrowser and then stacking them all on Registax. I guess I still have a lot to learn about wavelet processing! All the images above are comparable in their apparent sizes except for Venus. Venus looks like 50% of the width and height pictured above (yes even then, Venus looks larger than Jupiter because it is very close to Earth these days). I am quite ecstatic about the whole shoot because I managed to capture all the planets barring Mercury and to a reasonable detail. I didn't expect the GRS on Jupiter or the Cassini Divide on Saturn or the featu

This is a good month to spot the planets, the whole five of them which are visible to the naked eye. As soon as the sun sets, check the western skies and you will see a very bright star very close to the horizon. This is in fact not a star but the planet closest to the sun, Mercury. Mercury - Evening of 26th Jan 2014 Next to appear on the skies is Jupiter, the largest of the planets and a gas giant. Check around 7PM towards the eastern sky. Locate Orion and draw a diagonal using the two corner stars of Orion towards North East. Jupiter would be close to that line and will be very bright. In fact, if it is cloudy, Jupiter's might be the only light you can see. Jupiter - Evening 26th Jan 2014 Mars appears on the sky at around  mid night. But if you wait till around 5:15-5:20 in the morning, it will be directly above your head with a slight reddish tint. The brightest stars you will see around this would be Spica (closest to Mars) and Arcturus. Mars - Morning 27th Jan

The year 2014 started off with a discovery of a giant sunspot group later named AR1944. NASA stated that the group was one of the largest seen in the last nine years. Out of pure coincidence, I managed to capture an image of the group on 5th Jan and I repeated the exercise today after learning that I caught an image of a fairly important activity. The two images are shown above side-by-side for comparison. (The "cutoff" of the solar disc is not due to a bad crop. The Sun is too large to be photographed via a NexStar4SE and a 550D without a focal reducer, it is just just a little bit larger than the CCD). At the time, predictions were on that there could be a massive solar flare, heightened aurora activity and a disruption to electronics including satellite communication and navigation systems. On 7th January, an X class solar flare erupted and reached Earth around 9th and 10th. Although there are no reports of communication disruptions, everybody is expecting the

If you are a owner of a camera which has more than 10x zoom (better yet if you have a DSLR and a zoom lens longer than 100mm), you have a good chance of catching Jupiter with its moon on photo today. Jupiter is closest to Earth today. This means it passes roughly around 628 million km from Earth compared to the 928 million km when it's farthest from the Earth. Naturally the closer approach allows you to resolve the details of the planet much better. If you are a Sri Lankan, Jupiter rises from the east pretty much as soon as the sun sets and passes you over head around 20 minutes past mid night. Look towards the east (almost direct east, not north east, or south east) and try to find the brightest object you can see. That is Jupiter. Since a lot of people can recognise the constellation Orion, that also is a good starting point. Draw a line from the top star of the Orion's Belt through his shoulder and that line passes close to Jupiter. Jupiter it self is very bright, s