Mike Salway is becoming somewhat of a regular to this blog. Recently, he sent in the following images. Click for originals.

The first image was captured on December 26, 2007:

The second image was captured on December 02, 2007:

Accompanying his images, he writes:

After a long break, interrupted due to changing jobs, new laptops, processing planetary and deep-space images - I finally got around to finish processing the two ISS images captured on the December 26, 2007 and December 28, 2007.They were two spectacular passes, magnitude -2.4, passing about 70° overhead - though I could only capture them for about 40-50 seconds each, because of trees blocking the horizons.

I put my 12″ newt on the dob base (not on the EQ mount), and aligned the finderscope with a star. I tracked the ISS manually by peering through the finderscope and moving the tube, trying to keep the fast moving bright dot centered on the crosshairs while my DMK 21AU04 (in a 2x barlow) was recording at 60fps. Exposure used was 1/1200s and gain was almost maximum. Out of about 2500 frames captures, less than 100 had the ISS on them, and not all of those were sharp. I need to get a better hit rate!

It was an adrenalin rush, trying to get everything working for such a short period of time. On both occassions I forgot to press record in IC Capture until about 5 seconds had passed! doh! And at the same time I had my Canon 350D and 17-70mm Sigma lens tracking on my EQ mount, pointed at the sky - and I had to remember to press the shutter remote to start the 2 minute exposure for the widefield view. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to focus the lens accurately so the stars are blobby.

After all of that, i’m very pleased with the results though. Thanks to Ralf Vandebergh for helping me to identify the structures.

Thanks again, Mike, for all your contributions.

Last week, Didier Favre sent us a series of images, which show the opposition of Mars. The images were captured in December 2007. The next time that Mars is in opposition will be on nine years.

This series was captured over four days (December 18, 2007 to December 23, 2007). Didier used a Clavius 166 telescope and his monochrome astronomy camera DMK 31AF03.AS. The cameras was set to capture 15 images per second.

Below is the composite image that Didier sent us. Click for the original, annotated image:

Thank you Didier for this great series of images.

Christian Arsidi, who is based in Paris, France is known as one of the best planetary astro-photographers in France. He is particularly interested in taking absolutely spectacular images of the Moon.

Last week, Christian took the trouble of sending us some of his masterpieces. He captured the following images with his monochrome astronomy camera DMK 41AF02:

We send out a big thanks to Christian for these magnificent images and his interest in The Imaging Source astronomy cameras.

Efrain Morales is an amateur astronomer, who has been featured in this blog several times. Very recently, he submitted the following images, which he captured with his DMK 21AF04 monochrome astronomy camera. Click for the original, annotated image:

Accompanying his e-mail, Efrain added:

Here is another photo of Saturn on opposition day. The lower photo is one I took in 2007 when i got my DMK 21AF04. As you can see Saturn has changed it’s angle position and less of the ring will be shown next year. Thanks again.

If any other blog readers have taken such good images of Saturn, please do not hesitate to send them to us.

A couple of weeks ago, while at AstroFest 2008 in London, Aurélie and I met up with Gurbir Singh, the producer of podcast-based talk radio show on amateur astronomy.

Gurbir and I chatted for a while about The Imaging Source astronomy cameras.

You can download the interview here: astrotalkuk_interview.mp3 [5:24]

I would also recommend that you take a look at his web site, which already contains an archive of past shows, all of which deal with topics in amateur astronomy.