Living in Eastbourne, I am lucky enough to have the famous cliffs at the end of the South Downs close by; the panoramic views they afford are ideal for watching sunrises and sunsets, which are frequently rendered even more beautiful by dramatic coastal clouds. On Sunday 18th January I was driving back from a visit to the beach further east at Normans Bay, when I noticed a break opening up in the blanket of cloud to the west. Instead of heading home I made the short detour up to Beachy Head, where I was treated to this wonderfully picturesque celestial scene.
Best regards and clear skies, Oli
18/01/15 18:45 UT
Soft pastels on Rembrandt pastel paper with acrylic paint for Venus
Yesterday evening I could sketch the wonderful pair of craters Atlas and Hercules with charcoal and chalk on black cardbox. This was the second sketch I did of these craters. I had a look into my archive and compared the current sketch with the one done on May last year.
Both sketches have been done with my 5” Celestron MAK. What we can see is the different lighting conditions based on moon age and libration. Furthermore, the seeing conditions last time have been much better than yesterday – I could not go up to 300x yesterday but had to leave it with the 7mm EP.
Media: pencil, white paper, color invert and enhance with Gimp.
Binoculars Miyauchi Galaxy BJ-100 /45º
SeeIng: 3/5 (good).
This is my last drawing of Lovejoy comet. the comet shows an intense light and his tail extends beyond the field of view, being weaker and looking better by moving the binoculars.
the background of stars and the comet give a lovely image.
Object Name : Sun
Location : Granada (Spain)
Date 08/02/2015
Media: Graphite pencil, white paper.
Equipment: Coronado PST and Baader Hyperion 13mm, azimut manual mount.
SUPER SOLAR FILAMENT: It is, arguably, the second biggest thing in the solar system. A filament of magnetism almost 1,000,000 km long is stretching across the face of the sun. Only the sun itself is bigger. Stretched out, the line would fit 67 Earths!
The Suns surface has been very interesting to follow the past few days. A fascinating solar filament stretching across the surface is one of the longest recorded, over 700,000 km long. Solar filaments are made up of unstable plasma held above the solar surface by the Sun’s magnetic field.
I was able to observe it for 2 days in a row and marvelled over its sheer size, looking like a tear in the Suns surface. On this day there was also an interesting filament like region near the west limb that was wide and appeared dimensional in light and dark values. The “wishbone” prominence to the north appeared to be from beyond where the limb was visible, the top portion reaching toward the observer.
H-alpha Full Solar Disk
60mm Lunt 14mm 35x
February 8, 2015 1920-1940 UT
Seeing Wilson 4/5
Transparency 2-3/4
Cream colored sketch paper, grey & white Conte’ Crayon, 2B & 6B pencils and #2 pencil. Contrast adjusted in Photoscape.
On Friday, January 23rd, there was a triple moon transit on Jupiter. Io, Europa, and Callisto all crossed the planet’s disk and cast shadows on their way. It was a busy night for several hours, but at 11:10 Pacific time the view became almost comical: Io and Europa made tiny ears on either side of the planet while Callisto and its shadow provided eyes and Europa’s shadow provided a mole above the left eye. The polar regions provided a stocking cap and a bushy beard.
The view was through a 12.5″ binocular telescope, which added a 3-dimensional effect that really made the face stand out. The extra mirrors in the binocular scope create an image that’s upside down but correct left-right.
The beginning nights of this year l could study intensely the physics of the Jupiter and moons such as motions, speeds, approachings, etc.
Great seeing were on the nights January. 3, 5, 18th, l made 2 main body of Jupiter sketches, 100 of the moons’ movements brief sketches with my 13″ refractor during just only 3 nights and these were seems to surpass the total amount of knowledges about Jupiter system saved in past 20 years with my 5-8″ instruments.
Am 2- 5 ;00 , the seeing was maintained 9-10 /10 for 3 hours on 18th Jan. l could see even the internal simplest details on Ganymede that heart beating with it’s limb between expanding and contracting with a 2 -3 seconds cycle . You can see its one of the mouments here as a water color painting , the feature on the moon was not settled as one but changed as ” T,Y,<,V,X,*..." shapes in the eyepieces because of the hard 1.7 arcseconds dia observing object also because by the 4.5 Ju-Dia distant Jupiter's glare. l observed Ganymede for 1 hour , the features were seen 20 times with one time as long as 5 seconds in 3 minuts interval for 1 hour. The large grayish white "NPC of Mars like" looking feature was impressive.
Notice the Io, Europa's circular disks transformed as strong ellipsoid at 3;20 , weak at 4;02 on 3rd Jan. when they approaching together in the center of the field of the eyepieces. lt was very much impressive.
l prepared that night's moons contact time-site markings in their syncronous motions in my bird-eye view scale plans describes the objects' exact time-positions to seek light speed for following 2-3 months as the Roemer did 350 years ago. "Seek himself (or herself ) the light speed"... lt is a must for a ama-astronomer.
K.S. Min
2015. 1.3 - 1. 18
320mm refractor x400-600
Graphite pencils, water color, acrylic, crayons , white paper
South Korea