The week started with some morning photography of the Moon, Mercury, Jupiter and Mars Conjunction, and got busier from there. My photos have received a great deal of positive feedback throughout the week for which I am really humbled and grateful.

Excitement peaked again yesterday as I was fortunate enough to have my image chosen to be Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on the 26th February, which always brings a huge influx of visitors to the site.  Just over 24 hours later (since APOD published the picture), over 5,000 people have visited mikesalway.com.au, and the APOD link was also submitted to Digg where it now has over 1200 diggs.  

Whenever I submit an image for APOD, you always want it to be chosen and published, but neverexpect it. It’s always a thrill, and very exciting, to receive an email reply after so many times of receiving no reply

This makes my 5th image published on APOD, and interestingly, my first 2 APOD’s (#1, #2)were hi-res images of Jupiter, but my last 3 (#3, #4, #5) have been of conjunctions with nothing more than an entry level DSLR, a cheap Sigma lens and a tripod.

I do put a lot of effort into these shots and sometimes I’m planning them out days or weeks before hand. I guess I’ve been lucky to have captured these beautiful events with the sky putting on a special show. It is really nice, and really rewarding when the effort is recognised. It makes it all worthwhile.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me and given such great feedback on my photography.

Unfortunately I was clouded out during the 3rd (out of 4 for this year) transit of Titan across Saturn on the night of the 24th of Feb.

Fortunately though, a few friends of mine got clear skies and reasonable seeing to be able to capture this rare event.

Titan Transit by Anthony Welsey

The image above is by Anthony Wesley from Canberra, and the dark spot is Titan, not the shadow! The image was taken with his 13.1″ scope (LEXX) and the Dragonfly2 PGR camera. He captured for 60 seconds per channel, at 25fps in R and G, 20fps in B. Anthony stacked and processed the best 1000 frames from each channel as chosen by ninox.

Continue reading to see Trevor’s fantastic images and a long animation showing Titan and its shadow transit across the planet.

Read the rest of this entry »