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

2016

January

The Cinnabar Moth taken July 2015. Although our main interest in the summer is Butterflies we do like the more colourful Moths and the Cinnabar Moth is certainly that despite a lot of black! Latin Name: Tyria jacobaeae. It is mainly seen from May to August and its hindwings are mainly red whilst the forewings are predominately black with red markings as seen here. Hopefully this image is a reminder that warmer and hopefully drier weather is just around the corner.

February

Can you spot the shadow of an invisible eagle cruising above the lunar surface? This view of the craters of the lunar limb is rotated through 90 degrees for better effect matching how the image was first taken using the BT 10 inch Newtonian reflector and an ASI 224 camera. The flat floored wide area is a ‘lake’ called Lacus Excellentiae and the central dark floored crater is Clausius. The ‘eagles’ shadow is cast from a mountain range with the highest peak casting the longest shadow creating the effect of the head and beak of the ‘eagle’. The angle of the sun has to be just right to cause the shape of the shadow and the Moon was 11.24 days old (i.e. days after ‘New’) so worth looking at this area again at a similar lunar phase.

March

Nacreous Clouds, sometimes also called mother of pearl clouds, taken on the late afternoon of February 2nd 2016 from Horncastle, UK. Atmospheric conditions over the UK gave rise to the formation of these unusual clouds which have iridescent colours. These clouds were taken at a time when normal clouds would be in shadow but as the Nacreous clouds form in the Stratosphere around 9 to 16 miles up they were still in full sunlight.

April

Totally Eclipsed Moon taken during mid eclipse last September 28th 2015 at approximately 02:39 UT (03:39 BST). Taken with my 5 inch Achromat refractor and Canon 50D DSLR, a stack of 10 x 10 sec exposures at ISO 400.The brightest star above right of the lunar limb is 9.2 magnitude Hiparchus 1121 and the slightly fainter star to its right is 9.6 mag Hip 1087.

May

This is an Angle Shades Moth that I (Paul) found on the conservatory door and allowed me to get really close up with the iPhone 6+. The Angle Shades Moth or Phlogophora meticulosa is a member of the Nocturids family of Butterflies and Moths i.e. Lepidoptera, and its common name derives from the sharp angular pattern on the forewings.

June

Transit of Mercury. Full disk composite view of the progress of Mercury across the solar disk taken on May 9th 2016. Canon 50D DSLR, 5 inch Refractor on an NEQ6 mount. Roughly at 10 minute intervals but gap in the middle due to power failure and the final 15 minutes lost as clouds and our house got in the way!  Transit began at 12:12 BST at left and technically ended at lower right at 19:40 BST. Next Transit of Mercury takes place on November 11th 2019.

July

‘It’s full of galaxies!’  The area of sky bordering Virgo and Coma is called the ‘Realm of the Galaxies’ and with good reason as several thousand lie in that area. Here is one of the denser collections which lie near the bright Messier galaxies of M84, M86 and M87. Note that the circled areas occasionally have a couple of galaxies in them, sometimes one bright and another faint so the number of circles themselves does not cover all the galaxies found in the image.  To get an idea of distance, M87 is often cited as being at least 53.5 Million Light years away!

August

Stars and nebulae abound! This is the North America Nebula (NGC 7000) and surrounding star field including the bright star Deneb in Cygnus, the Swan. The Pelican nebula lies to the right of the bright pink North America Nebula and much of the darker sections of the image are actually intervening clouds of intergalactic dust. The image was taken with the Canon 300D which is modified to pick up more of the red end of the spectrum - many nebula emit more light in this part of the spectrum and most DSLR sensors tend to cut out the red end of the spectrum to give a more natural balance to normal daylight photography. The Canon IS 100-400mm lens  was used at 100mm and all was mounted on the Star Adventurer tracking mount. This is a stack of 26 images at ISO 800 and 2 minute exposures post processed with PaintShop Pro X7.

September

Painted Lady Butterfly feeding on our Valeria in the back garden. The Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) is a migrant whose numbers fluctuate from year to year depending on the weather. It spreads across the UK as it migrates from Europe but has few numbers in Ireland and Scotland. Some years it produces masses of butterflies whilst in others years it is either absent or is few in numbers. Food plants include Thistles, Common Nettles and in gardens, Buddleia. If the weather is particularly favourable it’s possible to get early migrants in February but most main migrations reach most of the UK by June/July. In our garden we usually see it late July into August and this year we have had two at the start of September.

October

The 'Double Cluster' in Perseus revisited. The last time the Double Cluster was featured as a POTM was back in February 2008 with an image taken with the Canon 300D DSLR and Equinox 80ED Refractor. This new image was taken on August 26th 2016 again with the Equinox 80ED but with a WO field flattener/reducer and this time at ISO 2500 and a stack of 42 x 60 sec exposures. The Double Cluster is listed as Caldwell 14 and is two clusters, NGC 869 and NGC 884, also known as h and Chi Persei as they lie in the constellation of Perseus. They are thought to lie close to each other but are around 7500 Light years from us. They can be seen with the naked eye as a smudge of light between Perseus and Cassiopeia if you have dark night skies.

November

The Willow Man. I (Paul) have often passed this sculpture whilst driving down and up the M5 either in the past for the Northern Lights Flights or more recently when I’ve given talks in Devon. It was created and installed in 2000 by the artist Serena de la Hey and for a while it stood alone and impressive in a field to the west of the motorway near Bridgewater. However, in recent years the area has become built up and so the view has been a little spoilt in my opinion. The Willow Man stands 40 feet with a 16-foot arm span and is made from Willow woven on a steel frame. It is also sometimes referred to as Withy Man, or Angel of the South. Further interesting information can be found on the Willow Man wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Man

December

Who doesn’t like a rainbow? This one is from a pan I (Paul) made using the iPhone 6+ when a stunning rainbow appeared as I was travelling up to Louth to give a talk. I just had to stop and find a side road so I could take the rainbow safely. Photographed on Tuesday October 11th 2016 just after 1pm BST. The clarity of the sky underneath the main rainbow was stunning whilst the secondary bow was also nicely seen.