Hi all

This image of Saturn was captured on the morning of the 6th January 2009 at about 2am, but it was still my birthday in Universal Time / GMT. The seeing was maybe a little above average but I was really tired, so it didn’t take much to convince myself that the seeing wasn’t good enough and that I should go back to bed.

So I only captured 2 runs, and the image below is from the second run. For all I know the seeing may have improved once I went to bed but I was too tired to care

You can see in the image below that the rings are starting to open up slightly again, but they will close again over the next few months until they are completely edge on and disappear from view in early September 2009. Unfortunately Saturn will be too close to the Sun to effectively observe from Earth at that time.

Birthday Saturn

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Hi all

This image was captured on the 30th January 2009 at my local “dark sky” site at the Mangrove Mountain Pony Club. I say “dark sky” in quotes because while it’s darker than my home, it’s not exactly what you’d call a nice dark sky site as it’s still only 20 minutes from Gosford and 1 hour from Sydney so light pollution is still prevalent – especially to the South.

It was my first imaging road trip in 3 months – the first since IISAC2008 and the lack of practise certainly showed. I forgot to take my USA plug to Australia plug 240v power adapter, so I had to power my Canon 350D off batteries. It also took me far too long to drift align and it was past 10pm before I started capturing any photons.

Anyway it’s far from my best image, but here it is – click the image to see the 1200px wide version in the gallery.

The Rosette Nebula (NGC2237)

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Well so far today hasn’t gotten off to the best start.

The Titan Transit occurred this morning – a very rare event which I was planning and hoping to capture, but after days of clear and hot skies, the southerly change came literally about 1 hour before the transit begun. So it was completely obscured by clouds. I haven’t seen any other reports or images yet but I’ll post here when I do.

Nevermind, can’t control the weather. I’ll try again at the next opportunity on February 24th.

Also this morning I attempted to upgrade my version of WordPress to 2.7 (the latest version), which has some cool new features such as threaded comments and a new admin interface – but unfortunately the upgrade failed. I started debugging through several files but gave up when the files became too large and too complex.

So I had to roll back and restore from the backups. The only positive news there, is that the backup/restore process has been tested and works fine! (phew!)

I’ll attempt another upgrade using a different process maybe tomorrow morning.. wish me luck!

One thing that didn’t fail was on Saturday – the Wedding Shoot! All went to plan, we had a great day. I’ll post more news about that and some pictures in the next few days or weeks. I took about 650 shots and have whittled them down to about 300 now, and will need to go through another round of culling before I attempt to process them!

I hope my luck for the rest of the day improves! Thanks for reading.