:: JimBlackhurst.com ::

I’ve just found a Satellite photo of the UK taken on the afternoon that Saragh and I rushed to hospital to welcome are daughter Poppy into the world.  Looking out of the window on the 7th January 2010, as Saragh went into labour, I had a feeling it was going to be a very special day.  The last time that there was Snow covering the whole country, we didn’t have satellites like TERRA and AQUA armed with the MODIS camera system to take such amazing photos.  I’ll keep this pic for prosterity.  Somewhere down there, just on the outskirts of SW London, as TERRA glided silently overhead, an expectant father leaned out of his bedroom window and wondered if the car was going to start all right.

Click on the image to get the awesome full resolution version of the whole of the UK.

Last night (17th March 2009) I was able to capture a few photos of the ISS and Discovery very close to docking. The combination of circumstance that has to fall into place is stagering, firstly, there has to be a shuttle about to dock, and that doesn’t exactly happen every week. Next, the orbit of the IIS and shuttle has to be favorable so that the orbital ground track pass will near enough my house to be able to see it, this is not so tricky, pretty much anywhere over Westen Europe will do.  However, timing is critical, it must be just in that sweet spot of dusk where the sun will still reflect off the space craft, but it’s dark enough at home that you can take a fairly long exposure without it being blown out.  Finaly, it has to be clear; a cloudy night would ruin it.  As you can see below, the clouds nearly did. I’m pleased with this shot, but if you want to see a better one check out Marco Langbroek’s blog

I recently bought myself a really cheep “fish-eye” converter for my camera from eBay, and surprisingly it’s not half as bad as I was expecting it to be. Yes it’s blurry round the edges and looks about as far from anything professional as you could get, but it did only cost five pounds.  It would have been rude not to!  Anyway, it is a .45 multiplier which on my 18-55mm kit lens, at the 18 end of the tube makes the effective focal distance 8mm ish.. I’m not going to get anything as wide as that until I get round to buying the sigma 10-20 (and then it’s 2mm longer, but sooo much nicer looking with it)

It’s been really cloudy here, and when it is clear, it just doesn’t get dark, I guess that’s the english summer for you.  I did manage to take a couple of shots of the ISS on consecutive nights, although tonight i was really aiming for the Early Ammonia Servicer which i think I saw, but in a totally unexpected part of the sky.  I’ll get it next time…

Last night I snapped Lacrosse 5 as it made its way over my house.  Lacrosse 5 is one of the US military classified Spy Satellites (or DarkSats if you are feeling dramatic).  I wanted to get one long exposure with it arcing across the full frame, but a series of screw-ups meant I got three different pics.  While I was watching it, I did wonder what it was watching as it sailed across my back garden (probably not much seeing as it was night… )

I snapped this a few nights ago (5/6/2008 00:01:55hrs 48sec exposure).  It’s a quite amazing flare from a NOSS Pair (3-4 I think).  It was purely by chance that I saw them rising fast in the southwest and I hit the shutter on the cam about half way through the flare.  As you can see, I didn’t really think about focus, this was taken with the Kit 18-55 lens on my D40x and it will loose focus if you even look at the lens funny.  There has been some heavy post pro on this image in photoshop to loose the light pollution and bring out as much sharpness as I can.

(It makes more sense if you were thinking of Beck’s – Where it’s At (“I got Two turntables and a Microphone”) when you read it)

I had the best night yet for Sat Obs last night, despite it being hazy and the ridiculous amounts of light pollution from living so close to London. I managed to score 5 naked eye sats, four of which I was able to identify, and none of which were anything obvious like the ISS. It constantly amazes me that I can get ~3.4 mag sightings out of my back garden, you should see the raw images that I get from the camera; bright orange!

Speaking of images out of the camera, I used my new remote to break through the 30sec Bulb barrier and did a few 1 Min+ exposures. For the final shot of the night I was aiming for Cosmos 2263 and opened the shutter with a 50mm lens attached, I visually picked up the satellite a few seconds later but bugger me if it wasn’t going the wrong way across the sky. Turns out that in a moment of serendipity, I had clocked Cosmos 1154 instead. Huh those crazy satellites!

The real buzz came when I found my original target Cosmos 2263 setting in the east, it’s path meant that the Camera shot that caught C.1154 probably caught C.2263 as well.

After some heavy duty PostPro in Photoshop to remove most of the light pollution, I had an image I’m proud of. In a geeky sort of way.

From the times…

Despite the outlandish predictions of some internet pundits, the future of humanity was never at risk today. But scientists were hoping to use the fly-past to work out how best to defend the planet against asteroids in the future.

As I mentioned in a post yesterday, the sat known to us as USA-193 has come to the attention of the worlds press as a threat to all life on earth, when, complete with it’s multi-megaton thermo nuclear power source, it hurtles back into the earth’s atmosphere from whence it once came, to wipe either London, New York, Paris, Sydney (or all of them) off the map. As is usually the case, the official sources are saying nothing, the press (and me) are just making stuff up, the only people with any clue what’s going on are the amateurs. To understand the real story of USA-193 and follow it’s progress, the best place to look is the SeeSat List. One of the seesat posters Dr. Marco Langbroek from Holland has a great blog that explains it all in detail.

USA-193 – Image by John Locker from the SeeSat List