On the 20th and 22nd March, I had two very busy mornings – capturing Jupiter (20th and 22nd), the ISS and the Moon all in the space of 2 hours on each of the days. I have finally finished processing the lunar images and am happy to be able to post these.

I used the 2x barlow to capture the ISS and used the Moon to test focus, so I captured a range of targets while waiting for the ISS to appear.  Included here are Copernicus, Sinus Iridum, Bullialdus, Aristarchus, Gassendi and Schickard.

The first image is of Copernicus using the 5x powermate. Captured at 60fps for 1 minute. The best 300 frames were stacked for this result.

Copernicus with the 5x powermate

The rest of the images are captured with the 2x barlow, again at 60fps. Next is Sinus Iridum.

Sinus Iridum

To see the remaining images and some processing notes, please read on.

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On Sunday morning, we had beautiful clear skies and I was able to capture an image of Jupiter with Io’s shadow in transit, followed by Io itself shortly after.

Unfortunately the conditions weren’t great and the image is really affected by the poor seeing, even though Jupiter is now climbing to a respectable 40-45° in altitude before dawn.

I captured 9 RGB runs but chose the two sharpest images for display here. They were taken approximately 30 minutes apart. Io can be seen just inside the limb in the second image.

Jupiter with Io shadow transit

Jupiter with Io and shadow transit

If you’re interested in the more technical details of capture and processing, please read on.

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On the 10th January 2009, my son Jacob’s cub scout group went on a bushwalk through  Bouddi National Park , starting from the top carpark at Maitland Bay, heading down through the bay, up and across the coastline and coming out at Little Beach.

Coastline at Bouddi National Park

It was a nice walk on a  popular bushwalking track. About 5.1km 1-way, we passed a lot of interesting sights, including the shipwreck of the S.S Maitland at Maitland Bay (although the tide wasn’t low enough for us to see much of it) and some lovely trees, flowers and rock formations.

I took my Canon 20D along with me, and this post is just a few photos from the walk which have been sitting on my external hard-drive for too long. So, please read on to see the rest of them.

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