Hahaha.....make sure you bring along your handphone and dial 911 if that happens.

I'm rolling on the floor now!

Vertu? apatu?

Silly me....I thought the Vertu was an extremely rare species of Tarantula. But now I want a Vertu!
Wow, wonder what it will feel like to dial 911 from one? "Hello Emergency Services? I'm calling on my Vertu. You'd better come and fetch me home or else....."

Mr.LKM, thinking of upgrading already ah? I'm falling down onto the floor again........

Ya, the 10 inch LX200 is a little heavy for Asians. But it's kacang puteh to the Americans.

Please keep us informed of any changes.

For your info, the movie `Contact' will be shown on Astro's HBO tomorrow evening at 6.35 pm and again on Saturday at 3.30 pm. I think I'll watch it again.

BTW if you had forgotten to invite julchin_09 , he could release a whole lot of fierce Pterinochilus murinus to gate crash the party!

Just a little reminder for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, here's a handheld shot (I left my tripod in the office.. ) I took at 8.25 pm this evening of three of the main actors getting into position. Without the tripod, I had to forget about long exposure, so it is terribly underexposed at 2 seconds, f4.8, ASA100 - I should have been using something like 10 secs instead.



At the top left hand corner we have Mars, and centre left is Saturn. The moon (with some earthshine) I think doesn't need to be identified. The bright star near the antenna is probably Eta Cancri (one of the stars of the constellation of Cancer) and I mistook it for Mercury when I took this picture. Mercury was actually lower down, hidden by the roofs.

Tomorrow at this time, the Moon will be fatter, and she will have moved to a position above Mars, forming a nice line with the three planets. And, if you look along this line from the Moon upwards, you will see the bright planet Jupiter just about overhead! Nice!

you mean goal post. see football everywhere hehe

Got it!

My first ever shot containing the Moon, Mars, Saturn and Mercury (in that order)!



Sorry that the planets look so dim and tiny - this is the result of squeezing the picture to a much smaller size, a bit of noise reduction, and recompressing to a jpeg. The planets turned out nice and bright in the original pic.

Just in case you can't find Mercury, it's there along the centre line, near the roof level, and almost hidden by a small dark cloud.

I know what you mean.

Just less than 4 minutes after I got the shot above, this happened:



My `Cassie' is a Casio Ex-Z750, nothing spectacular. Original is in jpeg format. No fancy RAW or Tiff capture on this budget camera. I'm not sure I want to upload a 3Mb file.......

I'm honoured and flattered that you think it is good enough to have a place in your blog!
Please feel free to do so.

Mr.LKM, here're two very challenging shoots for you.

1. Space Shuttle Discovery is now docked at the ISS for at least 10 days. See if you can catch them in their mating position.

2. Jupiter's two red spots (the Great one and Jr) are colliding! Next week will be fantastic time to try to photograph the planet. It's anybody's guess what will happen to the two spots. Will they merge or totally break up? It may be everybody's last chance to shoot the Great Red Spot.....

Unfortunately I have had to return the LX90 I was using, so no chance for me to try for these.

Mr. LKM, when I saw your Supernova, I grabbed my binoculars and ran outside to look for it before reading the rest of your blog!!! Aiyah, so realistic......

julchin_09, no, the telescope is not mine.....

Ya lah, I was so taken in I did not stop to think. Sometimes supernovas die down very fast so I just rushed out to see it.......

For the ToUCam, I just use the Philips VRecord software that came with the webcam.

My favorite site is of course, spaceweather.com. By now you can see most of my `announcements' come from there! Only very rarely am I able to find something before they publish it. I like to see the photos sent in by their readers. Hopefully one day one of us can also have our masterpiece shown there.....

With his Meade, he can spot you coming from 3 kilometers away! The polis will be waiting for you lah.


Congrats, Mr.LKM. Your Jupiter shots are spot on for the LPI. I think the bluish tone is caused by slight underexposure - I get that most of the time too. But I don't mind because the highlight details are more important. If you overexpose, the planet looks more color balanced but washed out, and I feel that's worse. Jupiter has such a wide contrast and color range that it is quite challenging to find the best compromise in midtones.

For more details, you can try using a 2x/3x barlow. Some ppl even go for a 5x barlow. But that's a bit too much for the LPI's sensitivity with your 8" SCT, especially now that Jupiter is no longer at opposition.

Nice piece of work there, Mr.LKM. Looking forward to your next article.

Well, I only just managed to read your article on monochrome CCDs.

Maybe a bit too Meade orientated (could be annoying to Celestron fans lah)......how about something on the USD 2 Billion Hubble Space Telescope? I think it also uses a monochrome CCD......maybe cheapskate NASA couldn't afford a colour CCD. j/k.

Anyway, you nailed it on the advantages of the CCD imager over the DSLR. But Canon seems to be making a big push towards using their equipment for Astrophotography, so tomorrow (or the near future) the story may change.

Are you one of the producers for this yearly event?

I could say the same when I visit the Tarantulas thread........

Almost all the things we chat about in this thread are explained somewhere on the internet and only needs a simple google for clarification.

Highlight for this weekend is the Perseids mentioned by Mr.LKM. I hope I can catch a few falling stars......

Managed to see any thing?

Tonight's the peak for us. My eyes will be glued upwards after dinner........