What a night!

Unbeliveable show of auroras happened on St. Patric's Day 17. - 18.3. I was absolutely blow away by the bright corona dancing overhead for 8 hours! I let the auroras speak for themselves through these images, enjoy!

Corona and rocks

Northern horizon

Believe it or not this is a view to the southern sky! :O

Corona

Purple auroras

Solar eclipse

Miracles apparently happen, since weather forecast was awfully cloudy just couple days ago. We still had clear skies for the whole eclipse but clouds rolled in just 15 minutes past the eclipse. What a timing!
This was my first time seeing one live, and it was truly magnificent sight to withness. You could see lunar mountain silhouettes along with the sunspot AR 2303.

Unfortunately seeing wasnt good enough to take closeups of the lunar mountains, but atleast I saw them briefly with my telescope. These are stacks of 50 images to compensate turbulence in atmosphere. Cant wait to see solar eclipse again someday!

Partial solar eclipse 20.3.2015, you can see the sunspot AR2303 on the left.

This is as close as we got to totality from Kuopio, Finland. Only place in the world to see 100% totality is Svalbard and Faroe Islands.

Sun, sunglasses and the shadow of the moon.

Bring out the big guns

Hi ho hello, finally I found a suitable scope for my use. 200/1200mm f/6 Newtonian reflector made by Orion UK. Havent had a chance to test it out yet because of the weather, I am also gonna do some modifications to the platform. Planning to put some large screws on the bottom of the plate so I could use it on uneven ground aswell. Also I need to shed weight from the platform (45 kg of solid steel!), I am probably gonna cut off pieces to make it more X-shaped.

Cant wait for clear skies! I am also gonna buy some eyepieces for planetary / deep sky observing. :)

Behold the rusty mightiness!

Comet and stuff

Horray! First clear night for ages, decided to go for Comet Lovejoy. After a bit of searching with binoculars I found it  near Pleiades star cluster. Chilly - 25C here in Finland, thankfully there was a fireplace near by so I could go warm up between the shots.
Alignment turned out great aswell, although I am a total novice in it because I dont have my own tracking mount. My friend came with me and he has Astrotrac. By pure luck I managed to get it aligned fairly well. 6 minutes without trailing at 50mm, so I stacked 8 of them to gather more light.

On the left side of the comet, you can see Pleiades star cluster, in the middle the is extremely faint reflection nebula complex, called Perseus molecular cloud. The red emission nebula above it is California nebula.

8x6min | f/2.0 | ISO 200 with Canon 6D and Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II

Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2

Clouds, clouds and more clouds

Argh, its been almost 3 months with 100% cloud cover here in Finland. Luckily we had a break in weather last night and I quickly planned another moon shot with TPE.
This one didnt go as planned, I tried to get the moon directly behind the tower of Puijo (Fantastic viewpoint located in Kuopio). However I estimated the position of the moon bit off, I still quite like it.

Moon and Puijo
(5 EV HDR)