When We Left Earth

This is a very cool documentary series, consisting of 6 parts, looking at American human spaceflight. Well worth checking out...

You can find the other parts here: two, three, four, five, six.

That's my Saturday sorted!

Half of the planets in our solar system are visible in this photo.

From top to bottom, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Earth.

Sunny days!

The weather has been absolutely amazing lately! Savage sunny days, really high (for Ireland) temperatures and no cloud! Unfortunately, that means that night-time astronomy has taken a bit of a back seat, it doesn't get properly dark til midnight, and I'm working tons so I can't stay outside all night...

However, I've been doing a teeny bit of solar astronomy. I'm still finding it tricky to get decent focus, but I got this shot the other day that I was pretty pleased with!

As a comparison, here's the shot I pulled from the NASA website...

(Source)

Not perfect but I'm happy! 

Jupiter

I finally managed to get a half decent photograph of Jupiter!!

It's a single shot taken using a Canon 450D, so it's not brilliant, but it's the best I've managed thus far. I'm still working on getting a usable webcam for planets.

I had a quick wander around the sky looking for PANSTARRS too, but couldn't spot it. I found it alright a week or two ago, but my decent camera was out of order so this is the best shot I could get...

The sky is currently nothing but cloud, so hopefully it'll clear a bit later and I can try again!