eBothy Blog

Inspired by Steph’s picture of Orion and prodded by him to get out and do something, I headed out into the frozen night to track down An Sealgair Mor (The Great Hunter), Orion. First I needed to find out how to set the long exposure on the camera, a simple Canon PowerShot A560, using this page. So following Steph’s 10s exposure, I caught Orion rising over the distant glow of Mallaig in the SE. Back inside I messed with the lighting levels in Photoshop Elements to come up with this:

NASA are going to slam two pointy things into the Moon on the 9th of October and to get you in the mood, they’ve also published a Lunar Impact Party Kit. But what if the Moon burst and went zigzagging off into the void with a cosmic raspberry sound? Science would be REALLY cool then!

Citizen Sky is on the way and if you fancy getting involved you can get training to observe, theorise and publish on why Epsilon Aurigae is varying in brightness. There’s a good synopsis of it at Simostronomy. All I need is a telescope!

This Tuesday night sees the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower, when we pass through Comet Swift-Tuttle’s dustiness. There’s a handy peak flux calculator here. Choose number 7 Perseids and your location/year etc. Here’s the peak for Skye:

Turn the lights down and read this.

Lovely little Martian poem!

Just got back in time to get a couple of shots of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter over Sleat:

It was a very cold and clear night last night so I took the tripod and digital camera out for a few pictures of Venus and Jupiter, floating above the Sleat peninsula. Venus is the lower, brighter object, at -4.0 with Jupiter at -1.8.