Blue tit babies

We have six baby Blue tits in one of the nest boxes in our garden. 

Planetary trio

We went up on to the moors above our house last night to try to view three of our partner planets at the same time. Venus,Jupiter and Mercury are all visible low in the North West just after the sun sets.

There was low cloud on the horizon as the Sun set but it was clearing as we watched. Eventually with binoculars (only used after the sun had gone!) we spotted Venus and as the twilight deepened Jupiter and then Mercury. 

Eventually they were all visible with the naked eye until they one by one sank below the hillside. 

The three planets formed a triangle which just fitted into the field of view of the binoculars so just about 2.5 degrees across.

The picture is a stack of ten exposures taken just before Venus disappeared into the cloud, aligned, processed and annotated using Nebulosity and Lightroom.

There is a good article on Sky and Telescope. Click below to view. 

http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisApp?clickMap=link&webPadID=K1027545122

Floods in Weardale

We had very heavy rain two days ago and again last night. The Wear and it's tributaries have been very high causing significant damage. 

The bridge over the Ladley Burn  has been partly washed away and is closed to traffic. 

I walked yesterday from Bradley Burn back to Wolsingham . There is evidence of flooding everywhere with whole trees uprooted and debris lodged several feet above normal river level. 

However the ducks took advantage of the flooded grass!

Star cluster and a nebula

It was a wonderfully starry night here on Monday so I spent some time looking at the heavens and taking some images of Messier objects.  

Charles Messier (26 June 1730 – 12 April 1817) was a French astronomer most notable for publishing an astronomical catalogue consisting of nebulae and star clusters that came to be known as the 110 "Messier objects". The purpose of the catalogue was to help astronomical observers, in particular comet hunters such as himself, distinguish between permanent and transient objects in the sky.

The pictures here are of M13, which is a concentrated globular cluster of 300,000+ stars in the constellation of Hercules and M57, or the Ring Nebula, which is a planetary nebula in the constellation of Lyra.