Venus Transit, June 8^th 2004

122 years passed since the last Venus Transit! Of course, we had to be there and watch it. While Gary Gawronski, Diane and John Hughes went on a 18,500km trip around Australia to observe the event from Exmouth, Peter Adam and I set up our telescopes at Wellington Point. The weather looked threatening but we didn't get intimidated by the big clouds in the South. It didn't take long when the first walkers by inquired what we were doing.

The 'Black Drop Effect' on second contact is probably caused by the refraction of Venus atmosphere but is still not fully understood. Although this effect spoiled the results at the last transits it is quite nice to look at. Well it's good that we don't need Venus transits that happen long apart to measure the distance to the Sun. Radar is much more accurate and we can now just enjoy the transits for what they are without to think about the scale of the Solar System.

We had about 50 people looking through my telescope and enjoying the projection Peter's Refract or provided. The clouds didn't interfere until before sunset but more than spoiling the event they made it more interesting.

Peter and I look forward watching the next Venus Transit in 2012, and next time I will probably have a better camera to document it ;-)

May 21^st / 22^nd 2004, Comets Linear C/2002 T7 and Neat C/2001 Q4

After long time I joined the Leyburn camp again to witness two beautiful 'naked eye' comets in the sky. Our setting Moon and Venus gave us a spectacular view Friday evening. Earth-shine illuminated the moon and made the whole disk visible to us.

On Saturday Erwin was so kind to lend me his Nikon D70 camera mounted on his Celestron telescope equipped with a German Equatorial Mount. The lens used is my Nikon 200mm/f3.5 and the exposure time for both images was 3 minutes.

Linear:

Neat:

20 SUPERNOVA 2000cj IN NGC 6753

Rev. Robert Evans, Hazelbrook, N.S.W., reports the visual discovery of an apparent supernova (mag about 14.8) on May 14.7 UT with a 0.31-m reflector. Peter Marples rang me in the morning of Tuesday the 15th, told me about Rev. Evans's discovery and asked me if I could make an CCD image to confirm the finding. In contrast to an image in the Digital Sky Survey, my 1 min exposure shows clearly the appearance of a new star. The image was obtained with the Pictor 416XT camera on a LX200 10"/f10 in prime focus at 2:21 am on the 16/05/00. Following that I had to send my image to Robert H. McNaught of the Anglo Australian Observatory who calculated the position and magnitude of the Supernova.

July 16th 2000 - Total Lunar Eclipse

For a change the weather was excelent. Brisbane had not one cloud in the sky and with the moon being in transit at toatlity we had the best conditions to observe one of the longest lunar eclipses possible. The image on the left was taken just when the eclipse reached totality. It was taken in the LX200 10"/f10 prime focus with a Pentacon SIX TL, a midium format camera, using Fujichrome 400 and the exposure time is 5 seconds.

I made also video captures every minute of the eclipse, Chris Goh centered the images and made this Eclipse MPEG Movie (size 3.2MB).

October 4th 1998 - Lunar Occultation

On Sunday the 4^th of October 98 Our moon occulted Jupiter. This image was taken with Ilford XP2 400 Film. The Telescope is my LX200 10" with 3x Tele-Converter. It was impressive how fast the moon moved over Jupiter.