Little Planet of Waveney Mountain

I went to a local hilltop near the student residences in order to try and get a 360º panorama of the sky with my Canon 18mm lens, on a moonlit night. 'Waveney Mountain' is named after the former residences, which are themselves named after a local river and 'mountain' is a little joke among folk round here. After loads of practice with Hugin, a long pause (a few months) and several attempts at stitching the pictures last night, I have finally got something I'm happy with. I had to manually choose the control points that each pair of neighbouring images shares, and there was still a problem with a black wedge appearing in the place of one of the images. Hugin is great for remapping the pictures onto a stereographic projection but doesn't quite get what looks right, so I got it to remap the problem picture and pasted it in myself in Photoshop. A quick bit of clone brush to fill in the panorama gaps that I'd inadvertently missed and here's the result. Now I can do this, I'm tempted to get a nodal ninja tripod and a wider angle lens. Astrophotography can so easily be quite a costly hobby, but this was pretty inexpensive and a great idea to test out during moonlit season.

An re process of an old favourite

 

This is a quick and crude process of some stacked images of the Horsehead nebula. I took them through the 20 inch with the Canon 1000D (with the A-mod) in February 2013. I've just used the amazing Hugin software to assemble this mosaic of 4 images and tweaked it in Maxim, then applying a Digital Development Processing routine. It just looks stunning so I had to post it straightaway. The contrasting colours here make such an aesthetically rich faraway thing!

Zubenelgenubi gets some guests!

While testing my planetary imaging demo for the talk I'm giving next month (see: http://www.brecklandastro.org.uk/meetings/ ) I spotted Saturn and Mars setting in the South West. I got a snap and looked at the image and spotted a star. I then ran across the field with the tripod to get a pic of the planets above the dome and observatory. So not such a 'far away thing'. It's one of those mind-blowing distance ratios. I also caught Andy walking back to the observatory who came back telling me the star was alpha Librae - aka Zubenelgenubi, my favourite star name! So from top to bottom we have Saturn, Zubenelgenubi (alpha-2 and alpha-1 next to it) then Mars. A beautiful scene I realised when processing it to bring out the faint details, giving pleasing pastel shades on the sky. Just 1/4" second exposure at ISO 1600, I had to turn the gamma down again as blogger overdoes it!

Comet E2 Jacques

A night at the observatory and a moonless clear spell coincided! Not wanting to waste the opportunity I wheeled the society's new iOptron mount out and set up the 9.25inch Schmidt with the help of a busy crowd. I put my modified Canon on the back of it along with a f/6.3 focal reducer. Time constraints meant a full perfect drift-align wasn't possible, so I limited exposures to 30 seconds to reduce any star trails. Auto-guiding is not quite ready with this set up yet, but once we get the equipment together, beautifully long exposures will become possible! During the 20 minutes or so it took to get 22 good exposures, Comet Jacques had slid past a star and moved quite considerably! This required a special star then comet stack in Deep Sky Stacker. The result had a fair bit of star ghosting in the direction of the comet's motion and there is still a small ghost of the comet's nucleus left in the image that I couldn't remove easily. Several runs through Carboni's horizontal and vertical banding removal routine got rid of the bias pattern noise in the camera sensor, but the faint ghost trails were still a little annoying. I tilted the image until these trails were horizontal and ran another horizontal banding removal routine on the image. Then I tilted it back. Above's the result, and below with the faint parts smoothed. Not too much exposure, but am I right in thinking there's a hint of a tail to the right at about 110º CW from vertical? The green emission in the coma ('swan bands' in the spectra) comes from the molecules C2 and CN and their positive ions.

Midsummer Planets

 

During the light nights of summer here in the UK, planets are an ideal target. Unfortunately, we are also rather far North for good planetary imaging, as they are low in the southern sky, but this didn't stop me. I used the new iOptron mount with the Schmidt Cassegrain 9.25 inch f/10. After attempting a focal length of 11.5m, I also tried cutting it back to 5m and got just as good results. With the imaging source colour webcam, I recorded video with a range of exposures of Saturn and Mars. The mount tracked well despite a quick manual align. I manually fused the long and short exposures of Saturn in Photoshop after trying out the "Merge to HDR function" with less success. So the photo includes moons (L to R) Dione, Rhea, Tethys and Enceladus - just, below the planet. Mars also had a distinct phase (88%) and is only 9.9 arc seconds tall (phase mask added). Vaguely visible are Mare Acidalium (top centre) and Mare Erythraeum (bottom) as the North pole is tilted toward us. Taken 22UT 24th June 14.

Cometary Conjunction

I managed somehow to get an image out of the 20 inch scope after its drive rebuild. It has been out of action for imaging for months. The drives are still in their development stages, and I'd disassembled my focal reducer adapter for that scope. I had to image in short exposures (20s) and pick the best 30% or so. It was an ideal photo opportunity with the 3.7 magnitude guide star χ Ursae Majoris, a degree from the brightening comet 2012 K1 PANSTARRS, and its usual companion, galaxy NGC 3677. Still, this lovely pairing made a great view and photo - they just fit in the frame. χ UMa is a little off the top of the field of view (around 30' across). This comet is worth watching as it passes by φ UMa and descends into the summer twilight and may become visible in the morning sky in autumn. It has moved a little (SW) during this images exposure time.

Looking Inside the Pentagon of Auriga

The area in central Auriga featuring open clusters M36 & M38, IC 417 (around central star, phi Aurigae), IC 405 and IC410 - the flaming star nebula. About an hour's worth of 90 second exposures piggybacked on the top of my 8" through a telephoto lens with a modified Canon 1000D. Taken from Kelling Heath. There was a lot of mist and clagg in the air that night, so it's not bad! There are dark lanes and other patches of nebulosity lurking around this region of the milky way.

Jupiter - always interesting

I "videoed" Jupiter on the 8 inch Schmidt-cassegrain at the observatory tonight (11th March 2013). I got better results with just the 2x barlow than with 2 2x barlows. I was operating at f/20-22 (focal length just over 4m) and exposures of 1/54 of a second. I captured 2500 frames in 1min40, and stacked the best 1760 of them in Registax 6. The three moons made a beautiful triangle and Callisto cast a rare shadow on to the disk - something I noticed in the eyepiece, plus the red spot was in view. What chance! The Imaging Source (non-cooled) DBK colour camera was pushed into the scope and off I went. The moons to the right were (top to bottom) Europa, Io, Callisto - and you can see it is Callisto causing the shadow. Each moon seemed to have an independent motion to each other as the conjunction developed over the course of an hour or two.

Aurora borealis!

Yeah! I caught a glimpse of the Northern Lights for the first time this solar 'season' on Thurs 27 Mar 22UT. It was not too impressive aesthetically, but lovely to see the lights again. A colourless dim glow was hovering, detached from the horizon and for a time, a shaft of light appeared in the sky just beneath Cassiopeia. The advances in Camera technology (and mine is well out of date) meant an easy capture of the wonderful colours.
Here I've done a stack of 8 x 15s images pointing N, just N of Norwich. I stacked on the ground, not the stars, so they are trailed. The green, lower glow is from atomic Oxygen, i.e. O atoms, emitting during the decay from excited singlet S state to the singlet D state, an allowed transition. The red light, also from atomic O, is only seen at higher altitudes, where the air is much thinner, this would occur at lower altitude but the excited state causing it is knocked back down by collisions with other air molecules. This excited state is the singlet D mentioned above, the 'first' or lowest energy excited state, and it releases its red light with a time constant of about 107 seconds. This means it needs to avoid getting hit for about a minute, in order for it to have a change to spit out its red light. The reason for this slow time is because the transition from singlet D to the 'ground state' (triplet P) is forbidden, as the spin has to change from singlet to triplet, something not allowed by quantum mechanics.

The Milky Way over the Bristol Channel. New processing.

I have had another go at processing the twelve 30-second (dark-subtracted jpeg) exposures that I took of the Milky Way setting over the Bristol Channel last September. I was not happy with the 8-bit look to the background subtraction and the lens-distortion. I used the beautifully complex free program hugin to correct for the barrel distortion of the lens and stack the images based on a spherical geometry. I had a long task, taking many hours to work out how to get the control points only on the stars. I eventually found a method for hugin to use to pick the control points, and it resulted in a beautifully stacked final image except it came out with a distorted perspective. So I stacked the shore images and recombined the image with the stars, and ran a background subtraction. The resulting processed image is much sharper but still with very slight trails from the individual 30 second exposures. I've reduced the scale to 0.25 here (jpeg), so the trails are barely visible. Altogether not bad for 12 minutes on a tripod perched on a windy clifftop.

There's nothing like stargazing live

It's not live as we know it, Jim. It happened 11.4 million years ago. But - that's using our human concept of time. In reality time isn't a constant thing - there's no such thing as simultaneous. As far as I'm concerned, the recent supernova in the galaxy M82 has just happened, because all of us on Earth agree that its light has reached us in the last few days. That's good enough for me. Last night I was spurred on to get my 8 inch Meade LX10 SCT out of its box and onto its tripod positioned in my urban back yard. I popped in an eyepiece, focussed and swung it round to Ursa Major. After only 2 or 3 minutes of dark adaption I had seen the supernova with my own eyes. That was awesome but very quick. A near conversation on social media meant two other astronomers (whose blog links are here) had swung their kits round to image it. Thereafter I had a go at imaging it, with limited tracking and got a few 15 second exposures at f/6.3. I left it running and later did a stack of 75. A little blurry. Tonight I have selected the best 45 images out of 100 and used PIPP software to debayer and crop them around the galaxy. A quick stack in Deep Sky Stacker gave me a smooth image, and a DDP (digital development processing) gave this result. Much better than before, but only 11 minutes worth of data on a Canon 1000D is not gonna cut the mustard these days. Still I'm pleased to see it - so here it is. The society's telescope is currently unable to be used for photography, and we've been using it for stargazing live open nights, hence the lack of blog posts.

Maria Smythii et Spumans

November 13th brought a favourable libration around the eastern limb of the moon so I couldn't resist taking a few videos on the ImagingSource DBK camera through the C9. The C9 is the society's 9.25" Schmidt-Cassegrain, which is ideal due to its long focal length and having retained its collimation well from last year. I decided to not use a barlow lens as I was at f/10 with a focal length of 2.35m, and captured low noise lunar detail at first quarter with exposures of under 10 milliseconds. I processed in Registax 6 using multipoint alignment and geometry correction and mosaiced 4 sharpened frames, which I've cropped here. I filled in the gaps with a bit of quick clone brush - so don't trust the detail at the bottom. I was aiming to capture the aesthetic beauty I've experienced from viewing the sharp, grey edge of the moon. Mare Smythii and Mare Spumans show up well in this image. Unfortunately, Mare Orientale - the Eastern Sea, discovered partly
by Patrick Moore, is now officially classified as being on the western edge of the moon.

A HUGE planetary nebula

The Helix Nebula, a large death shroud of a star, floats across the Southern sky in October and November and never climbs higher than about 23 degrees altitude. The width in our sky (as it is quite close) is around half the size of the moon but it is very much fainter and usually buried in the murky low atmosphere. I used the large aperture of the 20 inch telescope and the society's Atik 383L camera to capture it. I got 6 minutes through each of 5 filters: Red, Green, Blue, Ultra High Contrast, and Luminance (all white light). The scope is due a drive upgrade soon but it was working more or less satisfactorily last night on this object. There were a few jitters, but no guiding was required, now that the pointing model has been reset. This planetary nebula has thrown off another fainter wisp of gas that you can make out to the lower left. The centre is glowing mainly from the emission of doubly ionised oxygen atoms and the outer part, hydrogen atoms. It was a splendid starry night, with transparent sky right down to the horizon initially, before a little mist started to form and was wonderful to look up at the Milky Way while I waited for the camera to do its thing.

Welsh skies

Hi,
I was expecting good things if clear in Wales, and I was rather disappointed by the Brecon Beacons Dark Sky park. It had a large amount of glow from the South/SouthEast, and this was viewing it from the North of the park in Hay-on-Wye. The skies were very transparent and I could see stuff well overhead but the low light pollution was pretty bad. Also, the campsite owner had put up badly directed high-pressure sodium streetlights all over a beautiful little field. Hay, despite being a small place also had a few overly large lights, which affected the whole valley's look at night. There is of course the problem of clouds in the western part of Britain, let alone rain, so the view from the valleys was mist. However, when I got to the Gower peninsula I was pleasantly surprised to see all of the main Sagittarius asterism and when I got to the cliff top the Milky Way was touching the sea! The coastal light pollution to the left and right was horrendous but all there was to the south were a few distant lights on the coast of North Devon. I got the Canon on a little tripod and snapped a sequence of 30s shots, which I stacked a bunch of. In the picture here, taken after astronomical twilight, I have replaced the horizon and subtracted the large scale background features to bring out the details.

More Wales shots

Here's the view when I returned to the tent on the cliff top at Three Cliffs Bay, The Gower, Wales (30 second shot).

A view I first got after rushing to grab my camera from the car. This shows the star Kaus Australis in Sagittarius - a rare sight from this country.

A 90 second shot (detrailed roughly in Paint Shop Pro)

View from Hay-on-Wye

Some views of the sky from the North-West valley slide in Hay-on-Wye. Looking SSW (toward the Brecon Beacons dark sky park), SSE and ESE (into England). The levels of light pollution near the horizon can be seen. The bright campsite being typical of peoples unawareness of the dark sky status. I tried driving further up into the hills where it was dark indeed, but the foliage, hills and cloud spoilt my assessment of the sky.

Not such a 'far away thing'

In keeping with the original theme of my blog, I have been taking some "easy" shots of scenes recently, as the 20 inch isn't tracking too well at the moment. Here is the not so 'far away' International Space Station. A mere few hundred miles. When I saw this, I dashed in to the observatory, grabbed the camera, focused to where I thought was infinity and laid it on its back to do a 20 second exposure of the overhead sky. The clouds and milky way are not too prominent due to the unusually short amount of exposure time, but with minimal processing one can instantly see the beauty of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, and the full extent of the Summer Triangle: Deneb, Vega and Altair.

Allegorical nebulae

Hiya,
Havent posted for a while. I have been moving. Closer to the observatory. Yes! But I'm all back and doing proper astronomy again. I tried aiming overhead in what seemed like quite a light sky, in order to minimise the sky glow, but I encountered the damn problem of Alt-Az telescope rotation. Even on short (30 second) sub-exposures. I pointed at a particular detail of a nebula in Cepheus (see post below - mu Cephei) that resembles an elephant's trunk. Or at least is said to. Well here are 12 rather rotated exposures of it, combined to show the feature up quite well. I tracked on a star near the centre, but I think I'll not go over 75º altitude again (this was at 82º+).

Saturn

For a change, I'm adding a planetary image, obtained using the society's Celestron 9.25" f/10 Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope. I used the society's Imaging Source DBK camera and IR block filter in a 2x barlow lens, slid back to achieve more like 3x, thus giving a focal length of about 7m at f/30. This telescope works better for planetary detail than the stopped down 20" f/4.8 Newtonian, although it had to sit outside for well over an hour to cool to reduce internal air currents, while seeing also slowly improved. I recorded about 2000 frames at 1/30" on high gain and stacked the best 40% or so using Registax 6. This was taken a little after opposition (when Earth passes between the Sun and Saturn) on 7th May, at 21:31UT.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 drifts silently by

Here's around 50 minutes of footage of the asteroid 1998 QE2 drifting by us on the evening of the 2nd of June. I recorded 10 second exposures with intervals of 30 seconds on the 20 inch telescope, as the 11th or 12th magnitude asteroid culminated in the southern sky, in the constellation of Libra. You will see the imperfections in the tracking of the stars, and the apparent rotation, as the mounting is Alt-Az (altitude-azimuth, i.e. up-down left-right). The field is about 38 arc minutes across. The asteroid is quite large, much larger than the actual QE2, so it's a good job it passed a few million miles from us. Look out for the 'flash' of a (man-made) satellite trail and a(nother man-made) geostationary satellite near the end of the sequence. The geostationary satellite appears to move but in reality the right-to-left motion is because the stars are being tracked.

Huge local elliptical galaxy hiding directly behind the Milky Way

The asterism Czernik 11 pictured here, lies within the myriad stars in Cassiopeia, a constellation with the Milky Way running through it. It acts as a signpost to the galaxy Maffei 1. All that's visible is a nuclear region of a nearby galaxy, appearing as a diffuse 11th magnitude glow, very difficult to find or see among so many stars. Here I stumbled across it in April, after looking at comet PANSTARRS. It is hidden directly behind the Milky Way's dust and 98.6% of its light is blocked by it. In near Infra Red it appears as a huge galaxy stretching up to 23 arc minutes and were it not in the plane of our Galaxy, we would be able to see it well in binoculars on a dark night.

Another go at M87's Back Hole Jet

Here is the central massive elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster. M87 is huge and has an active nucleus (supermassive black hole) that is producing a visible jet as well as two much more distant radio lobes. The jet is detectable on fairly short exposure images, such as the 22 15-second exposures used to produce this image. The area in the photo includes two other galaxies of the Virgo cluster. I avoided using guiding, and rejected a few images with motion blur during the stacking (production of the final image).

The southern pinwheel from the UK.

This is the southern pinwheel galaxy, M83, taken from the northern latitude of 52½ºN. It was under 7º above the southeastern horizon when I got the 44 images of 30 second exposure. Using RAW mode on the modified Canon, and having gathered plenty of flats of darks has enabled me to divide out the light pollution background pretty well. A bit of gradient removal and digital processing gave me this reasonable image taken through a lot of atmosphere.

Two spring galaxies and a supernova

This pair of galaxies are M66 and M65, which are on the left and the right respectively. They are located in the eastern part of the constellation Leo the Lion, just around the centre of the Lion's imaginary femur. In M65, there is a supernova which you can see below the nucleus of the galaxy, halfway to the edge and a little left. This apparent star is not usually there, and it was brightening in the days leading up to when I took this photograph on the evening of April 6th. I took it in the usual way, with my modified Canon 1000D on our society's 20 inch motorised Dobsonian, and stacking lots of 30 second exposures. I was careful with the calibration frames in that they were gathered during the previous twilight. I've processed the image a little more gently than usual and used a digital development algorithm to make the image look a little more like peering in a huge telescope. I'm amazed with the detailed structures I can see in these two fantastic galaxies.

Detection of Distant Aurora

I was getting aurora alerts on my phone and with activity having been raging at Kp=10 all day and evening I couldn't resist driving North of the City and going for a look just before bedtime. I set up the modified Camera on a tripod and took a few 30 second, wide angle shots. One short sequence shot at around 2300UT on May 1st, showed a noticeable change when I flicked through it. There were three red vertical beams where there hadn't been any 90 seconds ago. The glow below these on the actual pictures had a greenish hint to it, showing it may have been green aurora but it was too masked by light pollution for me to be satisfied I was seeing aurora, so I had an idea of a rather more scientific technique of image subtraction. I manually blurred and shrunk the images in paint shop pro and did a subtraction. On enhancing the contrast, and getting rid of a few noise artefacts I got this weird picture. It is a difference picture, so the yellowish cloud is where the cloud was advancing, and the darker blue cloud is where the cloud was. So... I managed to defeat the cloud and light pollution to reveal proof of aurora! What's more I decided to do a rough distance calculation. I estimate the top of the red aurora is 400km high, which is seen at 20º altitude. This leads to a distance 1200km, or a guesstimate of around 800km, allowing for curvature. The green and the red emission of aurorae come from atomic oxygen, but the red is from a higher energy, long lived excited state. This state's energy gets quenched by collisions with air molecules below 100km or so altitude, due to the higher density of the atmosphere.

Comet PANSTARRS gets even closer to M31

On Tuesday night I placed my 8" telescope, roughly aligned, outside the observatory and attached the Canon 1000D to the photo bracket on top. I was using my old, russian 135mm f/2.8 lens stopped down to f/4. I got a consistent sequence of 83 photos of duration 15" at ISO 800 once the twilight had subsided from about 8:30BST (after having taken away the three where a plane grazed the comet). 15 seconds was the maximum I could get with the RA motor tracking before stars started trailing, because I'd had no time to align the mount. I stacked the pictures using Deep Sky Stacker and after about 10 attempts at processing, removed the gradient. Then I blurred the background and enhanced the faint features by brightening them, hence you can see the whole fan shape of the comet. The total exposure time was just over 20 minutes (with much more time taken up recording calibration frames). Just think... the Andromeda galaxy must look amazing from the comet! :)

Comet PANSTARRS approaches the Andromeda Galaxy

I popped out to a local hill on the edge of Mousehold Heath within the city of Norwich and took a series of 36 pictures of the comet with M31, the Andromeda galaxy in the frame. Each exposure was 2.5 seconds, and I collected 36 of them. I used the modified Canon 1000D at ISO1600 unguided on a tripod with an old 135mm f/2.8 lens at about f/5. I stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and created a background to subtract manually in Paint Shop Pro. I definitely need more exposure on this one, and tracking. But it clearly shows both objects. It was horrendously cold, so I didn't have the time or the patience to get flat and dark frames. I did spot the comet with 10 x 50 Binoculars in the twilight in the North West and it looked rather impressive, with the tail clearly visible.

apologies for lack of activity

Apologies but I'm preparing a talk for an exhibition of all BAS's work on Saturday at Norwich arts centre 2 pm. Also,thrweather has continued to be pretty cloudy. I have another observation to report. A positive sighting of cometPANSTARRS from the lab window through a 5" telescope! It ws tiny dot with a small coma in the deep twilight. Yes! (Apologies I'm using android to enter t this post)

Near Earth Asteroid

After the exciting news of the Russian meteor we finally got to seethe asteroid 2012 DA14. We used the 20" and thanks to our in-house it expert we got to find it between thick clouds. Excited to see the little thing drift through the eyepiece! Sorry no picture this time. Just too much cloud! Time 22:25.

Fifth moon of Jupiter

I finally found my fifth moon of Jupiter! It's called Himalia, and lives about a degree away from Jupiter in the sky. We recently opened our observatory to the public for three nights, and had clear skies for the last two. After the last people left the dome and were chatting downstairs I set to work obtaining more images of the star field near Jupiter. Unfortunately my Canon 1000D had had a slight mechanical problem, resulting in a brush hair being trapped in front of the sensor. The shutter open-close mechanism suddenly failed to move faster than 1/200" and I tried to clean it with a substandard optical brush. The calibration is a little out. The flat field needs to be updated and also the dark frames I used were from a warmer night. Depsite this, stacking 8 x 30" pictures gave me this interesting image, showing rays of light radiating from Jupiter...and a teency, tiny little dot that was not on the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey red plates. This is Himalia, an outer rock orbiting Jupiter way beyond the four big, bright Galilean satellites that were viewed by many folk earlier in the evening. Some of the visitors got a preview of Himalia on the back of my camera after I had tried to get a few early shots of it. The event was a great success, thanks to the weather holding out and our facilities having been well maintained.

A glimpse into Orion's depths.

At last! A snippet of clear sky between fast-changing clouds. Enough to grab a few 30 second exposures of a weird little nebula, IC 426. I turned to one of my to do lists on my phone, that contained unusual objects I wanted to image. I managed to get a moment after a short viewing session at the observatory to whack on my camera, focus on Alnilam, and run off some shots as I dodged the clouds. The moon was rising during the exposures, of which 12 were useful. I got home and processed in Deep Sky Stacker, using some old darks and flats, which I really need to update. Still I got this weird blue thing that looks a bit like the North America Nebula. All I saw on the back of the camera was a wavy line passing between the two brightish stars at centre and winding round like a river on a map. After processing, the rest of the nebula appeared, along with a few other patches. Judging from the colour, this looks like a reflection nebula. The nebula is located to the 'upper left' of the star Alnilam, and the orientation of the illumination seems to fit with Alnilam being the source. So as a first guess, this floating patch of dust could be part of the Orion Stellar Association about 900 light years away [need references].

The lunar city?

Well as usual in the British Isles, it has been cloudy. Very cloudy. Especially when the moon is out of the way. Anyway, I haven't blogged for a while, and was browsing some videos I recently took with the ImagingSource video camera, attached to the Celestron 9.25" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. I turned from Jupiter to the Moon on the 2nd November and found some beautifully interesting areas. I recorded 30 seconds of video around the rather disturbed 'square' area close to crater Aristarchus near the left edge of the moon. Oceanus Procellarum is to the bottom. In this image, with the sun high above the lunar surface, the terrain has a darker, browner appearance than the surrounding land and the brightness of Aristarchus really stands out. With Vallis Schröteri running across the square and various rilles and ridges in it, the area gives the impression of a city. Straight lines appear to fly around the whole image like jet contrails. Moving to the upper right from the volcanic looking Aristarchus, you come to the strange arc shaped feature Prinz, then Montes Harbinger. These mountains border the lunar sea Mare Imbrium. The video was selected, stacked and sharpened in Registax 6.

Cygnus supernova remnant

I finally got all 6 of my pics of different parts of this supernova remnant processed, including the flat field calibration frames I took during the following session at the observatory. This has really helped me tease out the faint filamentary details. The pictures are aligned but not spaced as they appear on the sky, so you don't have to pan around to see the detail. The real object covers a rather large patch of sky in Cygnus and is visible through an ultra-high contrast nebula filter in most telescopes from a dark site. They are reduced to 25% size here. Each picture is a whole bunch of 30 second exposures at f/3 using my modified Canon 1000D on the society's 20" telescope.

A new astrophotography challenge

Taken through the 20 inch scope, the ISS (space station) passed first 350 miles from the observatory, then went round the earth and passed 1000 miles from the observatory then faded into the earth's shadow (night). I had to chase it, but I got pics both times round with my Canon. I made them into this mosaic that puts the images much closer together The second time round (bottom), it was at a lower altitude in the sky. It moves at something like 20000 mph! I'm well chuffed just seeing some detail. I guessed an exposure of 1/800" at ISO 1600. Apparently the software we have can be programmed for tracking satellites. Next time the ISS shows its face in the evening, I'd like to give imaging it a proper go. The tracking accuracy involved in getting the ISS on our Imaging source camera's tiny chip with a barlow lens might well out stretch our capabilities.

Season two of the galaxies

In autumn, our planet's orbit takes us into such a position that looking away from the sun is out of the plane of the Milky Way. Spring is the best galaxy season, but season 2 of the galaxies is autumn, when we look out toward the galactic south. The milky way appears to roll around from South-North to East-West for northern hemisphere observers. In this vast blackness, in the constellation Pegasus are galaxies NGC 7479 and NGC 7814. The former is located below the bottom right star of the Square of Pegasus and the latter just inside the Square's lower left corner star. 7479 has amazingly wide spiral arms, and 7814 is as exact and edge on view as I've seen, but it was not possible to see the division visually in the 20" scope. For 7479 I stacked 35 30 second shots and for 7814 I stacked 14.

Palomar 8

Palomar 8 is a globular cluster orbiting our galaxy that we see as its passing through the galactic plane. This means it has lots of dust in the way and consequently its light is quite attenuated. I was browsing through Sagittarius with the 20" telescope and just hopped a bit to the left of open cluster M25 and got a few images of this faint globular.

Perseid!

Ka-pow! Another piece of space flotsam slams into the upper atmosphere at supersonic speed. This one, a remnant of comet 109P Swift-Tuttle encounters us at something like 58 kilometers per second. I had left the camera continuously exposing Saturday night, and the following Tuesday after Andy had set his DSLR going I had another crack of the whip. 13 second exposures seemed about right. I got lucky. Soon after starting I caught a Perseid meteor shooting through Cassiopeia, then I got even luckier with this substantial one. However I missed seeing it due to my strange posture while setting up the camera. I had just repositioned it on the ground and clicked the remote. After a few seconds, Andy exclaimed something and my shutter closed. He had seen it while looking about 90 degrees away - so it must have been pretty bright. The first I knew of it was the strange little white line that had appeared on the preview screen. It looks like it's slamming into the top of the tree and the glow from Norwich seems to add an aesthetically nice balance to the photo. Here is the single 13 second shot, with no processing.

Our overlooked neighbour

When I say 'neighbour' here I mean JUST 3 million light years away. Our 20" telscope has had some structural work done and we're in the process of tweaking it. I had some success with it last night but I might have reassembled my focal reducer lenses wrong as there was more coma than usual. Also I couldn't test the optics well as the mirror had become hot during the day and was cooling and also the seeing was poor for a while. I got some lovely pics of M31 (our nearest big neighbour galaxy) and M57 (the ring nebula) as well as one of a comet in Bootes. It was all going well until the house down the road switched its outdoor light on floodlighting the observatory for about 2 hours! I had to turn the dome away from them. So I got this nice picture of M33 with 1 minute exposures at f/3. You can see the collosal nebula NGC 604 to the left, and NGC 595 above the centre. What a pretty object, although of course it is an immense collection of objects.

A new surge of astronomical activity across the UK

What with the consistent beautiful clear weather we've had following months of persitent rain and cloud, the guaranteed clear skies have brought everyone out to look at the stars. I've spent many a moment staring up at the Milky Way on recent nights. You can follow it from Sagittarius and the Scutum cloud in the South, to the fork at Aquila the eagle, up through the Cygnus rift, where the swan flies along it from right to left, and across the gap to Cassiopeia, the 'W' in the North East. The double cluster is visible in the space between Cassiopeia and Perseus, who is climbing up from the North East horizon. Below Cassiopeia, the Andromeda galaxy is now visible again. When I look at this galaxy, I try to imagine it far beyond as well as below our Milky Way Galaxy above it. Of course, the true scale is unimaginable. This photo is of a fairly large patch of sky in Cepheus (the King), situated just above the Milky Way inbetween Cassiopeia and Cygnus. I centred on the nebulosity illuminated by the red star mu Cephei, called the 'Garnet Star'. Delta Cephei, the archetype Cepheid variable is visible to the lower left, also with what looks like some nebulosity near it. Some call it the Elephant Trunk nebula, but I guess I'd have to get a little more zoomed in. It's a stunning wide field with dark dust lanes strung out in front of the background stars in the next outer spiral arm of our Galaxy. Picture comprises of 9 x 1 minute exposures through a 135mm lens stopped to f/4, tracked on an EQ5 mount, and many flats and darks were taken to calibrate the picture.

At last... a clear night!

I had to take the opportunity of a clear night to get a picture of this lovely object with my little 8" Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope. The Society's 20" newtonian is undergoing a hardware upgrade at the moment, and besides this huge nebula won't fit into it's field of view. I went back to doing what I used to do, find a dark field, as far from light pollution as I could. My telescope's (Meade LX10) Right Ascension motor was tracking well now due to a replacement Tantalum bead capacitor on the PCB and I had previously calibrated it to sidereal tracking rate by following a star and adjusting a replacement potentiometer. I went near Seething, an old hamlet and airfield near where Norwich Astronomical Society's observatory is based. I was (and still am) horrified by the brightness of a glaring blue white light in the middle of the rural darkness. The people who install these lights must have no awareness. Anyway, I carefully aligned my tripod, which gave me good tracking for 30 seconds, despite the gentle breeze. Focused on Antares, and got a few test shots while darkness was falling. I captured 50 or so frames of this obejct, the Lagoon nebula, M8 on my modified Canon EOS 1000D, attached to the 8" SCT via an f/6.3 focal reducer. I also got all the calibration frames, Flat-field frames were obtained rather crudely in the field, using a mobile phone to illuminate an A3 sheet of paper held in front of the scope. It's probably best to use twilight next time as they weren't brilliant, but did the job. So here you go, my first picture for a long while on my good old 8" SCT.