Fixing a plate where the rain gets in and stopping my mind from wandering

 "Our dexterous 'Observatory Instrumentation Engineer and Associate Astronomer' - Jolene 'strong hands' McSquint has been working day and night during the current extended period of exceptionally inclement weather to fabricate a new 'fixing plate' to enable additional telescopes and cameras to ride piggy back on top of the 127mm. Meade Apo Refracting Telescope. Lets hope the weather improves and then we can test this new piggy-back rig by taking some long exposure guided images of the Andromeda Galaxy which rides high in early autumn skies.

The LVST (Lowestoft Very Small-radio Telescope), turned on for the 2017 Perseid meteor shower, is still capturing radar reflections from meteor plasma trails and has been left on to record the Orionid meteor shower in October".
 
Kurt Thrust - current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

" We have got some unbelievably good people and some unbelievably good kit - it's all so unbelievably good you just wouldn't believe it". 

Ronald Clump CEO - Jodrell Plank Observatory.

A Blast from the Past

Reworked data of Comet Lovejoy - 127mm Meade Refractor an Canon 600D DSLR - Reworked by Pip Stakkert - Jodrell Plank Observatory.

" Bad weather - particularly high level cloud - has prevented any imaging at the Jodrell Plank Observatory.  As the 'Observatory Team' was getting bored our CEO - Ronald Clump organised an impromptu 'Public Open day at the Observatory' -  all was going well until he asked Pip Stakkert our Imaging Team Leader to do the 'Kiddies' Face Painting'. There may be no 'I' in team but there are usually two in 'face painting'  Inorder to de-escalate tension I asked Pip to re-work some old data and this morning he came up with this rather nice image of Comet Lovejoy sporting a feline long tail". 

Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” - Oscar Wilde

Just one of a very few possible finds from the Observatory's gutters

"Micrometeoritic dust falls on the surface of the Earth at a rate of 6,000 kg per day. This sounds a lot but if you average this across the surface area of our planet it works out at only one particle per square metre per year. To maximise finding one of these micrometeorites increasing the collection area works. One place to look in urban areas is in the rain water gutters of large roofs. 

To that purpose I mobilised the Jodrell Plank Observatory team to get up on the roof and go prospecting!

Many micrometeorites contain magnetite, a magnetic form of iron oxide and commonly known as lodestone. So once the team had collected a pot of dust from the Observatory gutters, the magnetic particles were separated from the rest using a neodymium magnet. The magnetic particles were then inspected under a microscope.  Post industrialisation, much of the magnetic dust in our atmosphere is man-made rather than extra-terrestrial. So whether we found any micrometeorites is debatable. What cannot be denied however, is at no appreciable cost, the Observatory's roof gutters have never been so clean".

 Kurt Thrust - current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory

Two Persied meteors seen against the summer Milky Way - Canon 600D DSLR - 30 secs at ISO3200 on a Star Adventurer equatorial mount. Taken by Kurt Thrust  in 2015 from a dark sky location in Northumberland

 "Great work with no hit on the domestic budget and talking about domestics we are still having problems with our neighbour Mr. Shrodinger and his wandering cat. Unlike his cat this is not a problem likely to go away unless someone takes commonsense action. Today I have taken the executive decision to ask Waffles Construction Ltd to provide the Trust with a quotation for building a wall between the Observatory and Mr. Shrodinger's property. Great!" 

Ronald Clump - CEO - Jodrell Plank Observatory

NEO Asteroid 3122 Florence

Annimation created by Pip Stakkert from 10x 1 second still images taken using the Jodrell Plank Observatory's 127 mm.Meade refractor - x 0.8 reducer and field flattener - Canon 600D DSLR at ISO6400 - Annimation shows aproximately 20 minutes real time movement of near earth orbit ASTEROID FLORENCE - images taken between 00:56 and 1:16 0n 02-09-2017

"The weather remains mixed at the Jodrell Plank Observatory but the team were very anxious to try and image the Near Earth Object - Asteroid 3122 Florence - as it moved quickly up from our southern horizon into the constellation Delphinus the Dolphin.  In the event, the sky cleared for a couple of hours after midnight so we were able to take some rough and ready images. Asteroid Florence is approximately 4.5 kilometers in diameter - about the size of Everest- and radar has recently discovered that it has two tiny moons. 

When the above images were captured, the asteroid was travelling at 13.5 km /second and was at a distance of 7.1 million km from Earth. In astronomic terms this was a very near miss indeed. It does, however, give you some idea of how very empty space is!"

Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

Inverted and enlarged image showing position of the asteroid within a reduced star field

" Near Earth Objects present a real and present danger to our planet and for this reason alone we need to keep a careful watch on them.  An asteroid, travelling 13 and a half times faster than the speed of a bullet fired from a rifle and the size of Cambridge, hitting Earth would hurt.  Not good". Ronald Clump CEO - Jodrell Plank Observatory.

Square black dot shows the location of Asteroid Florence at 0:56 BST on 02-09-2017 : Credit SkyMap Pro 9

Enlarged time lapse annimation 20 minutes real time