~ My Stardust Observatory ~
Under the Milky Way

This is my first try in making a time-lapse movie from hundreds of still images that lasted for over 5 hours on the evening of the 27th & 28th of June 2014...I hope you like it :-)

If you want to include trees in your time-lapse, it’s best to wait for a night when there’s hardly any wind, that’s because you want to make the turning sky the object of interest. If the trees are blowing about, this distracts from the beautiful movement of the night sky as our Earth rotates under the heavens.

What can you see in the movie: The camera lens was pointed to the south-western part of the sky where you can see the dark dust lanes and nebulosity of the Milky Way within the constellations of Carina, Vela, The Southern Cross, Centaurus & Corvus.

You will also see come into view the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in the bottom left hand part of the images. This small satellite galaxy is gravitationally bound to our own galaxy at a distance of 170,000 light years away. The constellations of Scorpius and Sagittarius were starting to dive down into the western sky when unexpected cloud started to roll in…

If you would to try and make a movie with your time-lapse images then please download the doc below, I’ve outlined how I did it.
~ Please Note ~
This is just a guide for you as I’m only new to all this…best wishes, Noeleen :-)

Spectacular sunspot group AR2192 that put on an incredible show a few weeks ago has now returned and be renamed AR2209. Back in October this sunspot was the largest to have graced the solar surface in over 25years, but its not as large this second time around. That’s not to say it’ll not fire up again and produce some very active flares. Everyone will be keeping a close eye on it to see what will happen over the next few days.

We are having a lot of cloudy weather here in Queensland, so I’ve not had many days to capture any images, but today the 17th November I managed to take some images with the solar telescope. When I started to take some images with the refractor for a white light image the clouds come over again…. and that was the end of that!!

Please find an image below; I’ve used the one that I captured with the monochrome setting on my camera as it shows quite clearly the active areas around the dark sunspots where flares are happening.

There are also two active prominences on the eastern limb, with quite a large one rotating into view that seems to be associated with a filament that is just on the limb. There is also a very large delicate spray prominence on the north-western limb that is very fine in detail.

My images were taken with a Lunt 80mm solar telescope and Canon 700D camera that was on the monochrome setting, there are 45 images that were stacked in RegiStack6 and slightly processed in PS CS4.

Exposure times were 1/80th second and ISO800, the solar telescope is also tracking on a HEQ5 Pro mount.

It's official, this remarkable sunspot area that rotated across the solar surface during October was the largest in over 25 years.  It produced many M and X class solar flares but no CME’s thank goodness; I say that because it was an extremely powerful object!

Also this area may not be finished with yet, at the moment it’s transiting on the farside of the Sun, but by mid November it could be back, so stay tuned….

Please go to the Solar Dynamics Observatory home page and SDO’s blog to read all about how the solar space telescope viewed this amazing sunspot group and to see some incredible movies of the solar flares at: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/potw/item/573
http://sdoisgo.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/what-active-region.html

If you want to keep up with the current astronomical happenings like this spectacular event, then please visit the spaceweather.com web site at http://www.spaceweather.com/

It’s the perfect place to visit, because the astronomical community post there images here nearly immediately as things are unfolding…at times like these, it’s very exciting :-)

Please find below a montage of images from the 20th to the 27th October as sunspot AR2192 rotated across the surface of the Sun. I did take images for the 29th but the sunspot area was really foreshortened on the western edge with not a lot of detail to see. I was really hoping it might have produced a prominence on the limb as it said goodbye…but no such luck!