Photos by me

All photos taken with a Canon G2 camera. All photos are unmodified apart from resizing. I am willing to mail full size versions.

 

Jupiter and The Beehive Cluster

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ISS entering the Earths shadow

SkyMap Diagram (Thanks to Bjorn Gimle)

Photo / ISS Details

 

ISS and Jupiter

Heavens-Above generated diagram

Photo / ISS Details

 

ISS and Ursa Major

Heavens-Above generated diagram

Photo / ISS Details

ISS crossing Ursa Major. This is a closer view, taken 2 days after the last photo

Heavens-Above generated diagram

Photo / ISS Details

 

May 2002's gathering of 5 planets. These are 4 of them

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This diagram shows you what is what in the previous picture

 

A closeup of Saturn, Mars and Venus

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10,000 ft on the Inca trail of Peru and very cloudy. Damn!! I managed to snap a picture of the southern cross and a couple of nebulae through the clouds.

Southern Cross

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Sunrise over Lake Titicaca

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The Seven Sisters

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Ursa Major (Big Dipper)

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Cassiopeia

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Noctilutent Clouds (NLC) and ISS

I went outside to see ISS passing over but instantly noticed these strange, rippled, glowing clouds to the West. NLCs are so high in altitude that they still reflect the sun with an eerie white glow, hours after sunset in the night sky.

I managed to just about catch ISS and The Big Dipper with the NLCs

 

RainBow

Here are a few photos of a rainbow that I took from my flat in Luxembourg, there are 2 interesting things. The first is that there is a faint second rainbow to the right of the main one. The second is that the sky appears much lighter 'inside' or to the left of the main rainbow. Thanks to Jef Raskin for first explaining to me the cause of this. I have since also found comprehensive explanations of both phenomena here.

1 A Wide Shot Showing both Rainbows

2 Another shot of both rainbows

3 A closeup showing the colour difference either side of the main rainbow

 

Nightrise

click to enlarge

At sunset, everyone always looks to the west but miss what can be an equally beautiful site, what I call Nightrise, if you look in the other direction you can see the Earths shadow (the dark band on the horizon) rising in the east as the sun sets in the west. In the west, where the sun has set, the sky is often a rusty red colour. The sky in the east above the earths shadow is often a distinctly different pink colour. In this wide image, the far right is due south where the shadow can be first detected, the far left is due east where it is 'thickest'.

 

Mars and a Moon Pillar

1 2 3

In September 2003 Mars was as close to Earth as it would be for about 60,000 years. Here are 3 photos that I took on the 8th when The Moon was conveniently close to Mars so that I could catch them in the same frame. There is also a faint Moon pillar visible in the images. The 3 pictures are taken with different camera settings, details to follow.

 

Sites

 

Space Weather Far more interesting than Michael Fish

Heavens-Above Information on nearly all satellites in the sky. Find out when you can see ISS, The Shuttle etc. Also has a powerfull planetarium.

Amazing pictures of Earth from NASA.

See what the aurora is doing now.

Astronomy Picture of the day from NASA.

 

Software

 

Amiglobe Excellent sharware atlas, the best in its class.

Home Planet Amazing freeware astronomy software, I can't list all the features here, just get it!

Orbiter 2001 Another bit of quality software. Try out a bit of space flight yourself. Very detailed, very difficult, very good and very free!