About this site
My name is Ole Nielsen and I'm living in Rijswijk, a suburb squeezed in between the cities of The Hague and Delft in The Netherlands. I have Danish nationality but I have been living in The Netherlands for several years working for an international organisation.
I have been interested in astronomy since childhood but until recently I was a typical 'armchair' astronomer
reading about things like space exploration and astrophysics. Actually buying a
telescope and having a look at the sky myself had never really occurred to me. One reason
was that I considered it hopeless to use a telescope for anything useful where I live due
to terrible light pollution, bad weather, obstructed views etc.
However one day in September 1999 I visited a compatriot, Jan Andersen also living in Rijswijk. Like me he had seen the total solar eclipse in France and he wanted to show me his video from the eclipse. He had also been lucky and seen the totality although through thin clouds. Later in the evening he gave me a look at Jupiter and Saturn in his 80 mm refractor. I was amazed to see Saturn like a 3D object and decided that I wanted to have a telescope myself just for watching the planets. A few weeks later I bought the Celestron G-5 and I have had a lot of fun with that scope since then.
My observation location is the tiny backyard of my house. It
is certainly not ideal with buildings all the way around. Especially directions between
east and south are badly obstructed. Also heat from buildings significantly affects the local seeing.
As said, the light pollution here is terrible. I would
rate my sky as Bortle Class 8 (City sky) at best, see Sky & Telescope, Feb. 2001.
During the best nights limiting magnitude can be as good as 4.5 but more typically it is less than 4.
Mostly I can't see more than 3 stars in the Little Dipper.
The image to the right shows a satellite image of the
Netherlands by night. I live in the middle of the 'overexposed' area.
Have a look in my log book (no longer maintained)
The camcorder and web site part of this story also starts with the unforgettable solar
eclipse in 1999. I used my camcorder to record the totality phase of the eclipse. The
result was so impressive that I decided to buy a video capture card for my PC to get those
images into the computer. Then I made my first very crude homepage presenting these images.
In November while enjoying Jupiter in the telescope I got the idea that my camcorder should
be able to record what my eye could see in the eyepiece. I had seen on the internet that
other people had been doing similar experiments so it should work, and it did. I simply
held the camcorder in front of the eyepiece and managed to get some shots of Jupiter and
Saturn. The results were not so impressive in the beginning but I could see that the
potential was there. After a preliminary webpage with these results in December I gave my
home page a complete rebuild in late January 2000 and "Ole's Camcorder Astronomy
Site" was born (later renamed to "Ole's Astronomy Site" reflecting the diversification of the
site)
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| This is the orange night sky as seen from my house (Coolpix 4500 photo) |
 |
| My neighbourhood as seen from
Sterrenwacht Rijswijk.
Note the many 'sky-beamers'
in the background: These are greenhouses and the light from these things is just terrible. Talk about
greenhouse effect.. Photo credit: Willem Pont, Stichting Sterrenwacht Rijswijk |
The following copyright notice applies to all images on this site:
Copyright © Ole Nielsen 2000-2007
You are allowed to use the images for
non-commercial purposes on condition that you inform me by email about the use and give full credits to me.
Your browser must support frames, Style Sheets (CSS) and PNG images (all recent browsers do), otherwise pages will not display correctly. Further JavaScript must be enabled as several pages comprise dynamic elements based on javascript. Screen resolution of 1024x768 or better recommended.
This web site has been tested with Firefox 1.5 and Internet Explorer 6. Old browsers like Netscape 4.x will not display these web pages correctly (mainly due to broken javascript and CSS support). Behaviour with other browsers is unknown.
Monitor calibration. You should be able to see all 17 gray shades for optimal display of my images.
