Pascal Hilkens Astro Home Page
Friday, March 20, 2020
The Leo Triplet Galaxies
The Leo Triplet Galaxies consist of M65, M66 and NGC3628 and are located in constellation Leo about 35 million lightyears from Earth.
The picture was taken using Nikon D7500 and TAL200K f/8.5. Setting : 21 x 30s each and ISO6400. Raw data converted inot DNG and stacking using DeepSkyStacker. Final editing with CS4.
Monday, March 16, 2020
Kennedy Space Center & Cape Canaveral Air Force Station
Entrance of Kennedy Space Center |
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 |
Saturday, March 14, 2020
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.
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.
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.
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. |
First Stage Booster landing at Landing Zone 1 'SLC 13' |
Booster (right above the trees) from CRS20 Falcon 9 after landing as seen from SLC14 |
Monday, March 2, 2020
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.
Sunday, March 1, 2020
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.
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).
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