Early morning photography.

The Big Dipper over Santa Cruz de La Palma

I got up early to try to see comet ISON (which is low in the east just before dawn).

There was only one cloud in the starry sky.

Yup. Right in front of the comet.

Since I was up anyway, I decided that I may as well practise a bit of astro-photography. I need the practice after all. So here is the Big Dipper /Ursa Major and a big ferry arriving in Santa Cruz de La Palma. I think the main reason that the ferry is blurred is that it moved during the 30 second exposure.

And I took some photos of Mercury and Saturn. To be honest, I was hoping that to comet would pop out when I tweaked the exposure a little with Photoshop, but no such luck.

Mercury (top) and Saturn (bottom left) this morning. The faint star at the bottom right is about where I expected comet ISON to be, but it's a star in the constellation Libra.

Photographing telescopes at sunset

Me and the Superwasp follow-up telescope.

Last night I went up to the Roque to photograph telescopes at sunset. The time rather snuck up on me, so I left in a hurry and a bad mood, worried that I'd drive up (200 hairpin bends and about 75 minutes each way) and not get any photos after all.

As it turned out, I got arrived with about five minutes to spare. So I said "Hi," to Don, who was commissioning the Superwasp Follow-up Telescope and then got out of his hair - commissioning is a hard work, and sunset is a very busy time for astronomers. I was a bit disappointed with my photos of Superwasp itself, but I was pleased with the ones of the Liverpool and the Follow-up telescope, particularly the one at the top where I set the delay timer and put myself in the picture.

Then I went to the Automatic Transit Circle in hopes of getting one of it open - no such luck, but I couldn't resist trying to get a photo of the constellation Scorpio over the Roque itself. And while I was doing that I saw a very bright satellite over the other side of the sky, and hurriedly took this shot of the William Herschel Telescope, Cassiopeia and the satellite. The long streak is the satellite, because it moved during the 15 second exposure. I'm almost certain that it's the International Space Station, because it's so bright.

The William Herschel Telescope, Cassiopeia (the W of stars) and the International Space Station.

And finally I tried to get photos of Mercury and Venus. This was tricky, because stars and planets are too faint to see in the viewfinder of the camera - you have to take a 15-second exposure, and even then, you might not be cable to see anything until you upload it to a computer. It's rather like using rolls of film that way.

This photo of Mercury won't win any prizes, (I think the main problem was my 30-year-old tripod, rather than the camera. It certainly wasn't the sky!) But you can still see that Mercury isn't round. It goes through phases, and at the moment it's gibbous. Incidentally, the phases of Mercury and Venus are proof that Ptolemy and the Vatican were wrong, and Copernicus and Galileo were right. There's no version of the Ptolemaic system that accounts for Venus and Mercury being sometimes crescents and sometimes gibbous.

Mercury in a gibbous phase.

A Window on the Universe

Galaxy M 83

Want to learn about amateur astronomy on La Palma? Well, at last, my new website is open for business. Star Island is designed to be a window on the universe, and a show case for astrotourism on La Palma.

In future, I hope to sell advertising on the site, but for now, it's just for people to enjoy.

The Cat's Eye nebula

Star Party

My friends in Franceses have amateur telescopes, and my friend in Puntagorda usually has cloudless summer nights with no street lights nearby. So we finally put the two together.

The catch is that it meant camping, because the house in Puntagorda is tiny, but that made a change.

It's almost a year since I've been camping, partly because the previous exhibition wasn't a success. (See Sleeping With My Best Friend's Wife) This time I vowed to be better prepared, and bought two new sleeping bags.

We got there for lunch, and then I left my son with our friends (who were setting up telescopes), while I went off to take photos of a local artist for Ruido. That was fascinating.

We came back and cooked a barbecue meal, watched the clouds roll in, and discussed our chances of actually seeing stars.

It stayed cloudy, and my son went to bed. We stayed up, chatting and drinking wine.

Then glory be, the clouds disappeared and the stars blazed. I woke my son.

The big 10" telescope (the one in the photo. If you look closely, you can just see my son's eye in the innermost circle.) had a technical problem, but the 90mm was fine. We just had time to get a really nice view of Jupiter, complete with cloud bands and the four Galilean moons, when the cloud rolled back.

So we went to bed. And this time I didn't freeze.