Welcome
to John Murrell's Web Site
Please
note this is my old Home Page - information on this page is being transferred
to new pages on my web site as it is re-organised. As a result some
of the information here may be duplicated elsewhere. Information will be
removed where possible when it appears on a new page as these will be maintained.
For
my new front page follow this
link.
Old
Front Page information follows:
London
Borough of Sutton Light Pollution
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.
Here are some
pages showing some of my astronomical images
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.
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)
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.
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(C) Croydon Guardian
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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.
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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).
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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
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Image of Sunspot Group 652 taken on Sunday
24th July 2004. Using a Celestron 8GPS & Phillips Toucam Pro II
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www.johnmurrell.org.uk Last
Update Friday, 09 May, 2008