First day of Spring

Exactly at 4h30 local time, the first day of spring will start.

Kennedy Space Center & Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

Entrance of Kennedy Space Center

Visiting Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station March 6-8, 2020.

Entrance of Atlantis building with Shuttle Boosters

Saturn 1B rocket on the ground

Mercury-Redstone Rocket - Alan Shepard - first American in Space

In front of Saturn V building complex

In front of incredable Space Shuttle Atlantis

Selfie with Astronaute Heidi Stefanyshyn-Piper

Selfie with Astronaute Wendy Lawrence

My first live rocket launch : Falcon 9 CRS20

Life Falcon 9 CRS20 rocket launch pictures taken with Nikon D7500 and lenses 18-200 and 10-24mm.

Space Complex 40 as seen from Titusville

A couple of seconds before the launch of Falcon 9 CRS20

Incredable bright light a couple of seconds after launching

Close-up after first stage and ignition of second stage.

  For the first time ever I was able see a real live rocket launch. On March 6th, 23h50 local time, a Falcon 9 loaded with a Dragon spacecraft was launched from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. I observed the launch from Titusville at the Indian river, about 21km from complex 40. Even at this distance the launch was seen perfectly and very bright. The sound of the rocket launch came much later about 1 minute after T-zero.

First Stage Booster landing at Landing Zone 1 'SLC 13'

The first stage booster came back and landed at Space Launch Complex 13, Landing Zone 1. This was seen aswell very easy and very bringt. One day later I could see the landed booster from Space Launch Complex 14.

Booster (right above the trees) from CRS20 Falcon 9 after landing as seen from SLC14

SpaceX Space Launch Complex 40, One day later.

M104 with COAST telescope

The Sombrero Galaxy M104 taken with the COAST telescope in Tenerife. The Fits files are downloaded and converted to Tiff files. Final editing with CS4.

M17 Swan Nebula

M17 or Swan Nebula was captured using the COAST telescope on Tenerife. Previous I edited the pictures using webeditor and downloaded the file in PNG format. Final editing was done using CS4 but it was difficult to allign the pixels from the different filter pictures. As the pictures are also available as Fits files I downloaded these to my pc and transformed the format to Tiff using Fits Liberator : see this link. 
Once the tiff files saved, CS4 was used to allign and to edit the picture. Below the result; personally I'm very pleased with it.

Weather Summary February 2020

February 2020: a wet, windy and warm february.
February was a very wet month with 124l/m2 rain. Two storms passed resulting in a total wind run of 3603km. This feb month, a couple of local records are broken:  longest wet periode(8 days), highest monthly rain (124mm) and highest wind gust (46.8km/h).

M17 Swan Nebula

Sand storm in Tenerife is gone and telescopes are working again. My requests are completed and one of them is the Swan or Omega nebula, Messier M17. Picture taken with COAST C14 f/11 with exposure of 180s. The PNG picture was edited using CS4.