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

2017

January

Orion returns at the ELAC (East Lincolnshire Astronomy Club) observing site at Badge Farm, Lincolnshire. Whilst testing out a tracking mount I (Paul) took time out to take a separate image with the Canon 50D DSLR and 16mm lens on a tripod, ISO 800 and 60 seconds exposure. Orion lies to the right of the very photogenic tree at centre with Taurus above Orion, Auriga above centre frame. Gemini is mostly behind the tree but its two brightest stars, Castor and Pollux are just to the left of the tree.

February

Lorraine has quite an eye for detail and back in May 2015 she used her iPhone 5 to take this close up of our Poinsettia when it was surprising us and flowering quite late on. The detail was quite stunning and the colours striking and we now have an A3 print of it hanging on our wall!

March

Open star cluster NGC 2169 is popularly known as the ‘37’ cluster in account of the fact its main stars appear to form the numerals 3 and 7. The cluster lies in Orion at an estimated distance of 3,600 light years and was discovered by William Herschel on October 15th 1784. It may have been discovered even earlier by Giovanni Batista Hodierna around 1654 according to Wikipedia. This view was taken on January 2nd 2017 with the SkyMax 180 Pro Maksutov and the Canon 50D DSLR, 66x 30 seconds exposures.

April

Silbury Hill taken on October 5th 2016 with the iphone 6+. It is part of the Avebury World Heritage Site, a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a man made structure of similar age to the Egyptian Pyramids. The viewing area is open all year round but access to the actual hill is prohibited to protect the site. West Kennet Long barrow lies nearby as does Avebury Stone circle and West Kennet stone avenue.

May

Multi pane view of Mare Imbrium from the Alpine Valley down to the Apennines Mountains. The major flat floored crater is Archimedes with Aristillus and Autolycus to its right. Several individual mountains can also be seen towards the top including Mount Piton and Mount Pico. Taken with the SkyMax 180 Pro Maksutov and ZWO ASI 224 camera on April 4th 2017 at ~ 23:09 BST.

June

Two views from ~180 degrees to each other of Champ Island, part of Franz Joseph Land in the Arctic ocean. Taken on Paul’s trip to the North Pole in 2008 on the Nuclear Icebreaker Yamal as one of the Expedition team. The main glacier is at right on the upper picture looking out to sea whilst it lies just on the left side of the bottom picture looking inland towards the centre of Champ Island. In the upper picture the Yamal can be seen in the distance and despite its large size it looks tiny!

July

Two Small Tortoiseshell Butterflies enjoying our Valerium in the back garden on Monday June 26th 2017 when we had some decent weather. Amazing what the smart phone (Iphone 6+) can photograph nowadays!

August

The galaxies Messier 81 & 82 taken on April 1st 2017 with my Equinox 80ED refractor on a Skywatcher EQ6-R mount I had for a review  in the Sky at Night Mag, June 2017 issue. Stack of 54 x 1 min exposures at ISO 1600. At top left is the galaxy NGC 3077 and this image is cropped from the original to show up the main galaxies better.

September

One planetary nebula through the ‘eyes’ of two telescopes and one camera. This is Messier 27, aka the Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula. Both images were taken with a GPCAM2-290C but the top image was taken with the Equinox 80ED refractor (f6.25) whilst the bottom image was taken with the BT 10 inch (254mm) f5.1 Newtonian reflector. The two images help illustrate the different image scales depending on the telescopes used.

October

It is a rare event to see a Funnel Cloud in Lincolnshire but this one occurred on the Saturday of the Horncastle Astronomy Weekend held at Minting Village Hall, Saturday September 9th 2017. It caught everyone’s attention and many watched it carefully just in case it ‘touched’ down and headed our way! It didn’t do so and dissipated but was certainly an interesting sight!

November

If you are a Trekie then you might like this one. NGC 1662 is an open cluster of stars in upper right Orion which fans of Star Trek think has some resemblance to a Klingon Bird of Prey.  One minute exposure, ISO 2000, taken with the Canon 50D DSLR and SkyMax 180 Pro Maksutov on a Celestron CGX that Paul was reviewing back in the early hours of November 29th 2016.

December

Messier 56, a globular cluster that lies between Gamma Lyrae (Sulafat) and Beta Cygni (Albireo). It is a fairly smallish globular that at first glance doesn’t look much but repays observation if you have medium to large instruments. It is estimated to be almost 33,000 Ly from us. It is actually visible from the UK for a large part of the year but is technically a summer object. This image was taken with the  BT 10 inch (254mm) f5.1 Newtonian reflector and GPCAM2 290C camera and is a stack of 30 x 15 second exposures taken on the night of August 28th 2017.