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

2019

January

Probably the most photographed object in the night sky, the Orion nebula, Messier 42/43 lies at the centre of Orion’s sword. This image is a stack of 127 x 10 sec exposures at ISO 400 using the StarGate 500P Dobsonian and the Canon 50D DSLR taken on December 9th 2018.

February

The Running Man nebula lies above the main Orion Nebula M42/43 complex and is a reflection nebula where the blue light of stars is reflecting off a large dust cloud. This image is a stack of 124 x 10 sec exposures at ISO 400 using the StarGate 500P Dobsonian and the Canon 50D DSLR taken on December 9th 2018.

March

Black Rock of Luz or ‘Rocha Negra’ lies close to the popular tourist destination of Luz in the Algarve region of Portugal. It is an igneous intrusion forming a large basalt cliff that because of its hard nature is weathered slower than the surrounding landscape and so juts out dramatically into the sea. This view was taken by Paul as his friend Nick Norman flew him on a trip along the Algarve coast back in May 2004. The image has been improved using image processing techniques to enhance it learned by Paul since the original picture was taken.

April

The Museum of the Moon is a touring artwork by UK artist Luke Jerram and there are several ‘Moons’ at any one time being displayed around not just the UK but the world. Paul was delighted to be asked by The Collection museum at Lincoln (UK) to present a talk about the moon in support of their Museum of the Moon exhibition and this took place on March 29th 2019. A couple of weeks earlier Paul visited the Museum of the Moon at Lincoln for background research and this is just one of several images taken to show the stunning Moon globe suspended from the ceiling.

May

Sometimes, when there is bad weather or the moon is too bright for deep sky viewing/imaging, it is worth looking back and doing a reprocess of an older image as we see here with an image of M13, the Hercules globular cluster. This was taken on April 25th 2017 using the Equinox 80 ED refractor on a review mount, the CGEM2 It is a stack of 18 x 60 second exposures at ISO 1600 and recently reprocessed to bring out the star colours more and cropped to bring the focus of the image from a wide view into a closer view of the globular cluster. Above left of it is the distant galaxy NGC 6207, a spiral galaxy ~ 50 Mly away compared with M13 at 23,000 ly!

June

As it is June and we’re close to the Summer Solstice here is part of the famous Stone circle of Avebury. It was taken on Oct 5th 2016 whilst I was on a speaking tour taking in the Wiltshire AS amongst others. I (Paul) walked all round the full circle and it is hard to grasp the sheer size from the ground! To get an idea of scale, note near the centre of the image, a couple of sightseers passing each other who are ~ 1/3 the height of the stone behind them!

July

You don’t need to own a powerful and complicated DSLR nowadays to take astrophotos and this is an example taken just before midnight on June 21st. Looking south we have Jupiter (brightest object) with Scorpius to it s right and on the left just above the trees lies Saturn. This was taken with asn iPhone 7+ with a tripod adapter to keep it steady and using the NightCap app on the phone to control taking the image. The image details are ISO 3520 (!) F1.8, 10 seconds exposure with the camera lens working like a 28mm standard wide field camera lens. The light pollution from Boston roughly due south from the location can be seen below Jupiter.

August

In a similar theme to the July POTM taken using an iPhone, this composite shows the Female Orange Tip taken on May 1st 2019 using an iPhone 7+. The female doesn’t have any orange tips at all but the underwing gives it away in particular so you can’t confuse it with any of the other white butterflies. In the past to get such close up views required a DSLR with a long lens to get close in yet in the last couple of years in particular, Paul has been using an iPhone to capture images that are just as good and rarely uses his DSLR any more for butterfly photography!

September

Star trails captured in 101 seperate images then stacked using StarStaX software. Canon 50D 21mm lens, f5.6 at ISO 2000

October

One target: Two views. This is Messier 16 also known as the ‘Eagle Nebula’. Wide field in small telescopes the associated star cluster is the object to view but with larger aperture the Pillars of Creation can be glimpsed. The left hand image was taken using an Equinox 80ED refractor and GPCAM 290C camera and the right hand image is a close up using the StarGate 500 and GPCAM 290C camera.

November

Atmospheric solar effects: At the 2019 Horncastle Astronomy weekend in September we were treated to a spectacular occurrence of sundogs, circumzenithal arc and 22 degree solar halo and many of us imaged them with our smartphones.This is Paul’s effort with an iphone 7 with a sundog at lower left, the Sun behind the spotlight pole, a faint 22 deg halo and high up the rainbow like circumzenithal arc.

December

Back to showing what smartphones can do and this image of the moon was taken on September 21st in the early hours using a Bresser MCX102 GoTo telescope and the iPhone 7+. Although you could say that the moon is an easy bright target, you still have to attach the smartphone to the eyepiece then make sure it is in focus before tapping to take the picture. Paul suspects this will become the norm for anyone starting out in astrophotography by using their smartphones instead of the typical DSLR.