Welcome to our little home on the net. We are Steve & Rosemary and live in Buckinghamshire, UK. This is a blog of our life, sometimes interesting, but mainly boring. It is very picture orientated as Steve loves to take pictures, especially of wildlife. Sometimes he has his arm twisted by Rosemary and takes the odd snap of a weed.
Comet NEOWISE
Cloudless evening on Monday so I attempted to photograph NEOWISE. The problem I had was with my knowledge of the camera. I didn’t know where infinity was on the lens scale. Should it be hard up against the stop, on the infinity mark or some other position? Does it change with different zoom? During daylight this morning I discovered it was significantly different, more on the 300-meter distance, and does change with focal lengths. It is difficult to focus through the viewfinder when there is just black. No help from the moon to act as a focusing aid, because it was a new moon. So alas my pictures could be sharper. Possibly I should have tried focusing on the planets of Jupiter and Saturn which were very bright, close together and towards the South East.
The first photograph, where you can see the trees, was taken on my mobile phone. With a little imagination, you can see the comet trail point directly upwards. The second photograph was taken with the DSLR, zoomed and cropped to the comet.
The tail of the comet was just visible with the naked eye, but only if you knew where to look and had spotted it with binoculars. I was looking after 11 pm. Any earlier and the sky was too bright, leave it later and I believe the comet was nearer the horizon. When we saw the comet, it was towards the North West, halfway between the horizon and star called Dubhe in The Plough constellation. Dubhe is one of two pointer stars used to locate Polaris.
R and I had made a previous attempt by getting up at 3.30 in the morning, alas it was cloudy on the horizon, we looked in the wrong direction, and it was getting very bright at that time of the morning. Excellent view of Venus, it is now viewable in the morning.
International Space Station
By chance we saw the International Space Station fly over us on Sunday night. On the Monday and Tuesday I took to taking photographs of it. The first ones taken on Monday were short 30 second exposures. The last photograph taken on Tuesday at 23.45 was for the full duration of the visible portion of the flight. Unfortunately camera was not pointing quite the correct way, so we don’t see it fade out.
Lockdown Walk
A walk through Ham Wood and then back up to Grendon Underwood and across the fields home. The sun was setting, so some warm images. The Spring flowers were over, so what remained of the flowers were a bit straggly, though they still looked nice.
Lockdown Birds
Sitting at home, outside, drinking our G&Ts, you must have your camera at the ready. There is the Heron visiting our neighbours’ pond. There it is sitting looking ungainly at the top of a tree. The greenfinches, constantly fighting, and the young bird being looked after by its parents. All of this in view while you are sipping your Gin and Tonic.
Experimenting with the Moon
From the 25th April to the 6th Of May I took several pictures of the moon. On the 6th of May, there was a full moon, indeed a supermoon. The May full moon is 2020’s third and final full supermoon, and it’s also the third-closest, third-biggest and third-brightest full moon of 2020. All photographs were taken on a tripod, with a 2-second delay for the shutter. The exposure time was around 1/80 of second at f16 ish
