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Tonight was a rare clear and comfortable March evening when I decided to go out and capture the planet Venus, the Roman Goddess of love and beauty setting in the western sky. I chose as a foreground, the Riverview Cemetery in East Hampton, Connecticut. Perched on a hill overlooking Lake Pocotopaug. Venus, the second brightest object in the night sky (the moon is the first) was shining brightly just minutes after sunset. Here are a couple of images I managed to capture before it set between the obelisks of this sacred ground.

Several weeks ago I successfully shot video of the International Space Station as it passed to the southwest of Connecticut. Tonight the ISS was going right over my house in Marlborough at 6:08 PM. I decided to try to make a still photograph of it with my NIkon camera. Passing over at a -3.5 magnitude it was an easy target to find in my telescope and camera viewfinder. I imaged over 110 pictures within 3 minutes. What you see below is the best of all the images. It was approximately 349 KM above me at the time I took this image traveling at 18,000 miles per hour.

Here is a recent shot the ISS from NASA showing it’s present configuration. Compare it to what I captured.

Here is the ground track as it passed over Connecticut.

A friend in Washington D.C. mailed me a stack of photos of the early days of space exploration in the United States. They are very interesting to see how we looked at space in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I will start off this “Space retrospective” series that I will post here intermittently, with two photographs of “Sidewalk Astronomers” looking for the Russian satellite Sputnik launched October 4, 1957.

The top photograph are members of the Whittiter, California Amateur Astronomers Association using wide angle low power telescopes to try to get a glimpse of Sputnik on October 5, 1957.

The bottom photograph is undated, but is captioned that members of the public lined up to look for Sputnik at an unknown location.

It must have been unbelievable looking for the first man made satellite in the sky, the size of a beach ball.

The conditions were just about perfect this morning to try capturing the ISS in video mode on the Nikon D300s.

I set up in one of my dark sky locations in Marlborough, Ct. that had a good WSW view of where the ISS was going to appear at 6:07 am. The sky was starting to brighten just enough to give some good contrast against the ISS at magnitude -2.5 as the Heavens Above website mentioned.

About one minute later than predicted the ISS came into view as it sped across into the southern sky.

Here is a 15 second video out of 2 minutes that I captured on the Nikon D300s camera with a 85mm lens.

Below is the ground track for the ISS this morning courtesy of Heavens-Above.

This photo was released this week by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) using the new VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) of the Orion Nebula.

It shows a deeper wide angle look into the nebula in the infrared, allowing astronomers to look into the dusty areas never seen by astronomers before. (PHOTO CREDIT ESO)

Super-Sol Sunday! Get it? Ok, my brain froze a little while I was out for yet another weekend doing solar astronomy. It was 26 degrees outside with the wind gusting at about 15 miles per hour as I set up my scope in Farley Field in Marlborough, Ct.

After checking Spaceweather.com it looked like a nice sunspot complex 1045 was growing very large, very quickly. Observing conditions were poor to fair at best with the jet stream overhead, which helped blow a blizzard yesterday to our south and not hit us.

Here is what I got with my Nikon D300s. This shot is a composite of 2 images. One image taken for the surface features, and one for the prominences. Combined in Photoshop.

1045 is in the center of the northern hemisphere, and the new 1046 is just making it’s way around the limb of the sun on the upper left.

Hope you enjoy your Super-Sol Sunday!

Here’s the video.

I was traveling down Route 9 in Middletown the other day enroute to a photo assignment when I spotted a sun halo at about 45 degrees in elevation. This one the frist I have seen a in quite a while. I surmize that there was plenty ice crystals in the air from the blizzard that was hitting Baltimore and Washington D.C. to make this visable. Enjoy!

After work I took a quick look at the Clear Sky Clock for my area. It looked pretty good for a few hours this evening. So, I took advantage of the 30 degree temperature and continued astro testing the Nikon D300s camera.

I choose the astrophotographers most favorite target of the winter to shoot tonight. M42 the Orion Nebula and the area around it.

During the evening I tried asa/iso numbers ranging from 400-6400, using an exposure of 30 seconds, with a 300 mm Nikon lens set at f/4.0. The weather was 28 degrees at the times of the exposures, and a slight wind from the southeast. Dark frames were extracted in the camera after the exposure.

Here is the best shot that I came up with. This was done at 3200 asa/iso. Again, only 30 seconds long. Very slight processing in Photoshop. You can just start to see the noise stating to come through. For 30 seconds I think this is a great test of the camera!

Despite the winter storms of this week, today, the last day of January provided me a nice quick view of the sun. With a new sunspot grouping called AR1043 coming around the limb in the northern hemisphere of the sun, I managed to get some video of it. I will post it as soon as I can.

Unexpectedly this month managed to give me several good solar viewing days. Who knows what February will bring.

Here a couple of shots of my set up this afternoon in Marlborough, Ct.

Here is another looking into a 40mm eyepiece at the solar disk.

In a previous posting I mentioned that I had taken some video of sonspot complexes 1041 & 1042.

Here is the result of my efforts with a Meade Electronic Eyepiece and some turbulent atmosphere under some poor seeing conditions. Hey, it was sure nice to get out there and do some solar astronomy in the winter at all!