Odd Shots

I have a long history of missed opportunities with cameras but once in a while I get lucky.

So lets start with a scanned analogue picture of Pam from Knebworth circa 1975.

My first attempt at astrophotography with a little hand-held Olympus Trip pointed at the eyepiece of a Meade ETX 105 sometime in May 2005 I think! The Moon had just transitted Saturn – quite amazing watching Saturn coming out from behind the Moon – but difficult to capture (the eyepiece view was a lot clearer!).

Roll on to the partial eclipse on 20/03/2015.

Next is a strange atmospheric effect which inverted part of the headland in this shot from Oliva beach on 03/02/2018.

May 2020 was a good month for astrophotography. The “Supermoon” on 7/5/20 (appeared after the weekly clap for nurses) came out well although the colour of the Moon is rather suspect – sorry about that. At first the Moon in the picture looked just like the lamp – so I took another picture, an hour or so later, with the Panasonic through the Meade ETX and then spent many happy hours with GIMP and PhotoShop to reduce the image, colour it, make the background transparent and paste it onto the original photo.

Then on 30/5/20 I got this picture of the Moon with the Panasonic attached to a 40mm lens on the Meade ETX – just the right time in the lunar day to show the Straight Wall feature clearly.

January 16’th 2022 – this is a budget photo of the full moon using a cheap mobile phone held up to the eyepiece of a 3″ Heritage Newtonian table top telescope.

6’th of March 2022 and a clear night at last for a crescent Moon. For this shot I used a Canon EOS 800D attached to the Meade ETX. There was a lot of atmospheric turbulence at high magnification but a fair bit of detail nonetheless.

May 2022 and Oliva has provided the opportunity to photograph Sagittarius and Scorpio. There’s also a shot of Hercules with a collection of 3 constellations from Jan 2022 – Orion, Auriga and Gemini.