Short observing break (partly due to camera defect)

Short observing break here. Several reasons: apart from it being overcast the past three days, it includes that;

- I am working on a double lecture (Friday on my own university, next week in York);
- and am having to deal with a camera defect.

The camera defect is small but fatal for shooting the night sky: for some reason (loose electronic contact?) the wire-release no longer works when the camera is pointed upwards....

So if I am able to observe early next week and after I return from York, it will probably be the good old visual way with the ETX-70 telescope and stopwatch for a while.

Clouded skies, first signs of Spring

The skies again have been (and are) clouded again for a long time here. So I have little in term of observations to report lately. I do hope the conditions improve soon.

This anyway is a strange winter so far. It is the warmest on record since the start of measurements in AD 1706. So far, I measured only two days with the minimum temperature below zero degrees C on the station.

As a result, shrubs and plants are flowering already. Especially the crocuses have been flowering in abundance the past two weeks. Below are two photographs I shot with the Canon Digital Ixus 400 (the same camera used for the satellite imagery). The top one is from last Friday (shot in a small forest nearby), the other one a week earlier. The latter are crocuses in the courtyard of SatTrackCam.

(click images to enlarge)