Welcome to John Murrell's Web Site

My local council the London Borough of Sutton have recently replaced the street lights in my part of the borough. As a result of the poor design of the replacement lamps I can no longer carry out observations from my garden. To view the mess they have made and the amount of light trespass have a look here. In addition the page contains some details of Sodium & Metal Halide Street Lights.

Lunar Eclipse 300 Images of the Lunar Eclipse on 3rd March 2007 are here. Note these are straight from the camera but have been reduced in size and have not yet been edited. They have also been rotated by 90 degrees from when I took them !

The link here shows the conjunction of the Moon & Venus 4/12/2005. One of these is in the SPA website galley

The second here shows some images of Noctilucent cloud from Croydon on 14th July 2006

Both sets of images were taken with either a Canon 10D or a HP R707 digital cameras. Pages were compiled with Picasa so there are no captions or technical data. All images were taken from Carshalton Surrey UK except where noted.

Here is a page on observing Noctilucent Clouds - lets hope we get a good display in 2008

Hot News on Noctilucent Clouds the 2008 Season has begun early with sightings on the 4th/5th & 5th/6th May 2008 lets hope this will be a better season than 2007.

I have a page showing some images of the Lunar - Pleiades Conjunction on the 1st April 2006. Images taken from Kenley England. Unfortunately we missed the occultation that took place in North America.

If you wonder why your webcam or CCD images sometimes produce results that are total rubbish the answer may lie in turbulence in the atmosphere. We are all familiar with the normal turbulence that makes stars twinkle at low altitudes but there appear to be some other larger scale effects as well. My page on a Turbulence Event during the Transit of Mercury on 7th May shows the effect of a change in air mass with very different refractive properties during the transit. The pictures are taken as stills from a CCTV camera on a Celestron 8GPS. More details of the setup I used to record the transit are here are here. The final 5 images show some rather strange effects on an aircraft 'Con Trail' about one hour after I recorded the event on the image of the Sun & Mercury. It is not clear to me if the turbulence was the result of natural atmospheric processes or an aircraft. The images were taken from The Croydon Astronomical Societies Observatory at Kenley, Surrey, UK. (Section added 7th January 2006 - added now as I found a better way of getting the stills from the VHS tape)

I recently attended a weekend blacksmithing course at West Dean College where I made a Candle Holder. Some images of the completed item can be seen here. The candle stick is made from 8 separate hand forged pieces; three feet, three holders, one central spike and a strap wrapped round to hold the whole together. The finished piece was wire brushed and then waxed to stop it rusting.

All images on this website © John Murrell unless otherwise noted. Please EMAIL me at ( mail -+- at -+- (the address of this website) ) {remove the -+- and spaces as well} if you wish to use them.


(C) Croydon Guardian	This is a picture of me as seen in The Croydon Guardian - The picture was taken while we were observing the Transit of Venus at The Croydon Astronomical Society's Observatory in Kenley, Surrey. Interestingly the picture was taken directly into the Sun with fill in flash using a Canon professional digital camera. A copy of the article can be seen by following the link from the picture. The camera on the back of the telescope fed a monitor, a video recorder, the computer video digitiser plus we projected it inside onto a large screen. The time date & location were inserted into the video stream using a time code inserter - the time & position was derived from a Garmin GPS35 on the roof of the car. Time should be accurate to a few ms.

This shows part of my observing setup for the Transit of Venus - setup in the back of the car to shield the computer & monitor from the Sunlight so I could see the screens. The monitor has it's own viewing hood to allow it to be viewed in daylight. More details will follow when I have got some more pages compiled. You can see some pictures & diagrams of the equipment I used in a copy of a presentation I gave to The Croydon Astronomical Society on Observing The Transit of Mercury - the equipment was basically the same with the addition of monochrome monitor & a video amplifier to drive the 4 video devices. The presentation is here - (600k PDF File).


		Venus, just past second contact - this image was photographed from the image projected onto the screen using the equipment above. The projected image was around 7 ft x 5 ft ! Time is in UTC Picture courtesy of Paul Harper CAS

Image of Sunspot Group 652 taken on Sunday 24th July 2004. Using a Celestron 8GPS & Phillips Toucam Pro II