Super Crescent & Shetland Space race

Earlier in May you may have seen a Super Crescent Moon with Venus close by to the top right a nice sight indeed on a clear night in the western sky.

It might seem that the moon was extra bright and you would be correct as it is a `Supermoon'. The Moon is at Perigee-that is , the side if the moon's elliptical orbit closest to Earth. This actually makes the moon 5% wider and almost 11% brighter.

The term Supermoon also applies to crescents as well as full Moons. We didn't see the Da Vinci Glow, also known as earth shine. This is where the sunlight reflects from the earth onto the dark lunar surface. In the northern Hemisphere, Earthshine is extra visible in spring because springtime crescent moons are high in the sky at sunset

Will Shetland be chosen for the location of the UK satellite launch pad ?, well we are down to three sites. Saxa Vord in Unst is one and the winner will be announced on the 12 June. Last week Shetland Space Centre hosted an event to introduce the locals to representatives of the UK and International space industry.

Would be great to have this in Shetland so good luck to all involved. If successful it would be operational in two years time. Shetland has a history of delivering huge infrastructure projects and the fact the  RAF have a secured site at the early warning facility at Saxa Vord all bodes well for the island.

Aurora not cloud

How wrong can you be, the weather forecasts all indicated a cloudy night, yet in reality it turned out to be a virtually a clear night. This was in the south mainland while the north mainland, Yell and Unst suffered with thick cloud and drizzle.

We headed over to the west side as it became dark just as the Aurora stats started to become better, rising wind speeds and density with the BZ on the down.

The moon had also set earlier in the night so it was very dark just the right condition to see the many millions of stars.

As well as the Milky way green airglow could be seen , something that confuses people as sometimes they think it could be the Aurora, but this was facing south not north.

However looking north the Aurora was bright and around 10.15 it became slightly more active with green pillars moving across the green band. This was only a  KP3 but being so far north it was a good show.

Around 10.45 the cloud started to arrive so we headed home well pleased.

With now well over 1,000 members Shetland Aurora Hunter has grown well since I started the group back in December 2016, just send me a request to join.

I had one of my Aurora photos from the 8 September published in the Shetland Times last week. It was rather a disappointing quality, but this wasn't unexpected as it is always a difficult subject to reproduce.

Recently I have had a couple of Canvas prints done and they have come out well. The Sony A7s only has 12 mp but they managed to produce good prints at 30x20 inches. Metallic paper and Acrylic are other  good options.

I have had numerous questions about processing, some don't like any type of enhancement except sharpening. A lot of Aurora photos for me are too dark so it is important to make sure that the histogram is about 1/4 way from the left, it is worth putting the ISO up to gain a lighter photo which usually shows less noise- noise lives in dark places.