In a tribute to the astronomer who died earlier this year, BBC Radio4Extra is repeating her 2008 series "Cosmic Quest".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bfpzk
It's on at 2:15pm each weekday, so the 30-part series will run through to mid-May.

As it was clear last night I was able to observe this "conjunction" through my Canon IS binoculars. I also took some images to process, but was rather hampered by terrestrial "clutter" such as neighbours' TV aerials and 'phone lines. venus10.jpg venusp.jpg Note the faint "ghost image" to the lower r...

Here's an update from this morning (yesterday evening their time):

The planet Venus is tracking through Taurus at the moment, and this Friday it will transit through The Pleiades Cluster . I've just been looking at some recent images from the MicroObservatory remote telescope facility: https://waps.cfa.harvard.edu/microobservatory/MOImageDirectory/ImageDirectory.ph...

I saw this report on the BBC today on wide-field astrophotography without aircraft trails:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-52120114

What a useful facility this is! Yesterday Keith and I spent a few hours on the channel, talking throught the processing of his comet images. He was sharing his screen so that I could guide him through the required steps in IRIS . And Cheryl joined us for a while, with an update on her use of the DSL...

Yes, Bill and I joined Carl on the "BAS channel" and watched the progress with his home-made auto-guider.
Meanwhile I kept nipping out to check how my comet imaging session on C/2019 Y1 was going: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1045

Apart from C/2019 Y4 (reported in another topic http://www.boltonastro.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1040 ), the ATLAS programme discovered another comet a couple of weeks earlier, last December. This one is also around 8th magnitude, but not so well-placed in the sky at the moment: it's sinking ...

Last night I had a problem whilst trying to polar align my Celestron CG5 mount on its tripod: no matter how I adjusted the Azimuth-setting screws, the mount head didn't move. I eventually realised that the two screws were tightening against each other , rather than the registration pin which protrud...

I had another look at this comet last night, this time using my vintage Starlight Xpress Mx716 camera on my C8 telescope. Things didn't start too well, with a mechanical problem on my tripod (the registration pin had sheared off, but I soon replaced it with a piece of studding and was up and running...