Paul & Lorraine's Picture of the Month pages

Our Picture of the Month page began with the June 2002 image of a Peacock Butterfly and each month a picture taken by one of us (mainly by Paul but occasionally taken by Lorraine) is selected to be the current months image. The pictures can be of a wide range of subjects but as you can imagine Astronomy, Nature and Butterflies do tend to dominate!

We hope you enjoy the many images and continue to watch out for what images we select for future months and years to come.
Paul & Lorraine

2013

January

Norwegian snow capped mountains taken on March 20th 2011. This is from the Malsev Mountain Village where we stayed when Omega Holiday was invited to the grand opening of Bardufoss Snowman International airport with the aim of specialised tours to see the Northern Lights amongst many other activities. This is the view looking roughly south.

February

The craters of Hercules and Atlas with surrounding features taken in the early morning of Dec 2nd 2012 with the SkyMax 180 and DBK web cam.

March

Saint Basil's Cathedral, Red Square, Moscow. Taken on July 22nd 2008 when I visited Russia prior to joining the PAV Eclipse Expedition to see the Solar Eclipse that August from the Arctic Ice. However the aim was not just to image the cathedral but also the tiny dot near the centre of the image which is Jupiter!

April

Having never seen Glastonbury Tor except on TV, during the March Northern Lights Flights I (Paul) took a small detour whilst on the way to Bristol from Bournemouth and made a point of photographing it.

May

Comet C/2011 L4 PanSTARRS didn’t quite live up to the hype about it’s ‘naked eye’ brightness but nonetheless it did put on a fine binocular show during late March and into April. The view here is cropped from the original image which was taken on April 2nd using the Canon 50D with the Equinox 80ED Apo on the NEQ6 Skywatcher mount. It is a stack of 19, 60 second exposures at ISO 1000 then post processed using PaintShop Pro 10.

June

The ‘Pacman’ nebula (NGC 281) so named because it seems to resemble the video game character! It lies in Cassiopeia. The view here is slightly cropped from the original image which was taken on October 15th 2012 using the Canon 50D with the Equinox 80ED Apo on the NEQ6 Skywatcher mount. It is a stack of 35, 2 minute exposures at ISO 800 then post processed using PaintShop Pro 10.

July

An Arctic Fog Bow taken on the 2008 North Pole/Solar Eclipse Voyage on the Russian Nuclear Ice Breaker Yamal. This was taken on July 26th 2008, two days before we reached the North Geographical Pole. The cracks in the ice are due to the passage of the ship through the ice and hints of blue sky lie beyond the patchy fog

August

Butterflies have often feature on these pages so here is a Female Meadow Brown Butterfly taken on the afternoon of July 30th. It’s a slightly damaged specimen but over the last few years we’ve noticed a decline in several of the main species that come to our back garden including the Meadow Browns. You can tell female/males apart as the males have dark brown upper surfaces whilst the females have a splash of orange as well.

September

I (Paul) have always wanted to get a good meteor picture and most of the time the ones I have managed to get have been faint and not that impressive. So I was pretty pleased to get this one on the night of Aug 12th/13th 2013 during a 5 hour meteor marathon. That night I spotted 108 Perseid Meteors and 19 ‘others’ making 127 in total! Out of 937 images taken I caught 30 meteors, lots of satellites and with this months picture both in one go. The Perseid is the coloured streak at top and a flaring satellite is at the bottom. Cassiopeia lies between them.

October

Observers attending the 2013 Horncastle Astronomy Weekend (HAW) enjoyed a clear night sky on the Saturday night. Perseus lies above the trees with the Pleiades just rising close to the centre of the image.

November

A stunning rainbow spotted after Paul had given a talk at Doncaster Astronomical Society back in May 2013.

December

The Andromeda Galaxy, M31, taken on September 29th 2013 using a WO ZS71ED refractor. Stack of 19 x 2 min exposures at ISO 1000. Note the other two smaller fuzzy patches which are the two companion galaxies.