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.

Grazing occultation of Jupiter

We were due, at shortly after 3 am Sunday July 15 for the moon to pass over half of the planet Jupiter. This view was only visible in a short band across the UK, with our observatory smack bang in the centre. I stuck it out at the observatory. It had clouded over yet again. I was watching the satellite picture. Andy came over, not wanting to miss anything, but it started to rain, on and off. The situation didn't look good. After Andy's departure and a further hour, the clouds started to part in the West and in a bright sky I found stars to focus the scope on. I attached the Canon and eventually the tiny break passed over the moon, and I focused. A slightly bigger break revealed bright Jupiter, just off the moon. So I missed it, but saw a beautiful conjunction in the morning sky. I got two shots to make this mosaic. It's amazing how fast the moon moves. Brilliant Venus poked out shortly thereafter, and I watched them all the way home, rising into the ever brightening dawn twilight.

Wolf 359

I was recently reminded of the song Far Out by Blur in which the star Wolf 359 is mentioned. I remembered that I had located it and taken a shot recently on a solo astrophotography trip to the observatory. It is about 13th magnitude and can be found in the South of Leo. The star itself is a red dwarf, a little bigger than Jupiter, you can see the deep orangey red colour to it in this photo. But more significantly, it is one of the closest stars to our Sun at 7.8 light years away and so its motion causes it to drift across the sky from year to year (~5"). Here, it is moving from top to bottom and slightly to the right, so it will pass close to the star beneath it in the coming few months. A background galaxy (14.5m) can be seen to the lower left, and an even fainter one (17m) above the arrow (Magnitudes found using Aladin).

The Noctilucent Clouds are back!

Hurrah! I get a lovely feeling when these return. It's almost like the Gods are happy. I didn't see any last year, which is unusual for a night owl like me. This was a pretty display blocked somewhat by some lower cloud drifting past the northern horizon. I stepped out of my urban abode after midnight last night (June 25) to check out the twilight in the north, and saw a wispy glow. I put something warm on and drove out just north of the city with a camera and tripod and took a few shots. I could see an intense but small column to the NNE, that dissipated slightly just before the tripod was up. This shot was 5 seconds at ISO 800. I could also see Saturn and Spica setting in the south west over the airport, and Sagittarius in the south, with a hint of Milky Way running upwards into the Summer Triangle. I popped out at 2:30 to see a much brighter display in the stronger twilight where wave structure was very evident. Doing a bit of cloudbusting, it looked like three symbols, with the first one a 'Y'.

Venus in transit

Just before I took this picture, I had driven 150 miles to find clear enough weather. It was around 5:10 am, the birds were singing and Venus had almost crossed the sun's disc for the second and last time in my lifetime. I had decided to stop somewhere, I didn't know where, in a field in Buckinghamshire. I set up a portable 4" refractor telescope on a lightweight tripod with my DSLR camera attached, focused on a distant hillside and set the exposure as low as it would go. I waited. At about 5:30, as I thought it was getting too late, luck came my way as a cloud break slid toward the sun. An ever brightening patch appeared in the sky and rays shone out of the edge of the cloud. The full moon was setting in a clear blue sky behind me. Then I saw the sun's edge emerge in the viewfinder. It was a beautiful sight to see a clear bite out of the edge of the sun. A quick snap was all it took.

Venus approaches transit

No it's not the moon! I filmed Venus using our society's Imaging Source DBK camera while it was right near the Sun in the afternoon sky last Saturday. I had to mask the telescope and shade the telescope using the dome. Venus was flickering about creating double and triple images flickering back and forth in the sun churned air. I had to analyse the best 10% of images and stack them. It's about 4% lit here. It's on its approach to transit the sun. I hope it's clear as I'm getting up at a darn awkward time.

El Sol, le soleil, die Sonne, the sun, yr haul.

On a sunny saturday afternoon Andy SMSed me about doing a bit of solar astronomy. We got down the observatory and I got the 20" on Venus and the Coronado SolarMAX onto the bright object you see above. With DSLRs we adjusted the focus, filter tilt, and exposure to get several pics that were subsequently stacked using Registax. I've put the earth to scale, which reminds me there's the Venus transit at dawn on the 6th of June... of course Venus will be closer than the Sun so appears as an almost arc minute sized disc. Venus is now rapidly approaching the sun in our skies and I wait in anticipation, hoping for clear skies.

Black Hole Jet

For the first time, I've imaged a jet from a supermassive black hole. This one lies at the centre of the elliptical galaxy M87 in Virgo. It is an active galactic nucleus, which means the black hole is swallowing stuff. Big stuff, like vast clouds of interstellar gas, dust and whole stars! The black hole spits the material out again as jets that shoot out of the galaxy for thousands of light years. This one is tens of millions of light years away from us. I heard a recent talk at our society by a guy who was into quasars, and it made me wonder if I could get a picture of this relatively close by jet. I was told to use short exposures to avoid over exposing the bright core of the galaxy, so I used 10 seconds at f/3 on the 20 inch with my good old Canon 350D. I used the best 26 pics and used 40 darks. In hindsight I could have upped the exposure a little. I applied some old flat fields later and tweaked it a little. The pic at the top shows a close up of the nucleus and jet, which in true astronomical fashion, appear as little fuzzy blobs. At least this fuzzy blob is more of a fuzzy streak, but it's such an amazing thing to visualise it from such a distance. I've also uploaded the original size field where you can see a few more small members of the Virgo cluster.

Integral sign

The so called Integral sign galaxy (UGC 3697) is actually a mirror image of one. All the same, it is a beautiful thing to photograph as it is so thin and has a patch of distortion presumably caused by the nearby 'little' elliptical galaxy. I used the Atik 383L+ on the 20" to get this image. This is a deep sky challenge for visual observers, located in the northern constellation of Camelopardalis (the giraffe) - at the time it was due left of Polaris. I wonder what other mathematical symbols lie out there in the cosmos?

Amazing conjunction!

This would be an impossible conjunction, mainly because of the fact that the bluish star, zeta Boötis is out of the plane of the Solar system. Also, the brightness of Mars and the star is a bit fainter than that of Venus. All these were taken on the evening of Thursday 26th April using the Imaging Source DBK camera with a 2x barlow lens on the Celestron 9.25 inch SCT. Mars was particularly sharp, even at a scale of about 0.25 arc seconds per pixel, as it was nice and high in the sky. Zeta Boötis is a double star challenge, I wanted to see if I could visibly separate two stars less than 1 arc second apart. Given Mars is about 10 arc seconds across, I think I can see a fainter star, just above the main bright one. It's not clear or fully seperated but elongated slightly at what looks like a Position Angle of about 350º. Is this right? I think I had the camera orientated correctly so top is approximately North. I'm now going to check it out, and see how wrong I am (I'm trying to be scientific and not biased about it). Anyway enjoy the lovely composition!

Update on z Boo: I was wrong. It turned out I'd tried to detrail the star a little, just 1 or 2 pixels, but the trail was in fact the pair, and they were equal in brightness on a East West alignment. So I had (unscientifically) assumed my raw data was in need of a correction, and in so doing, hid the possible detection of the second star! It is apparently only 0.5" away. Here's the original pic.

The edges of the lunar landscape

Here, we are peering slightly around the north east (top right) side of the moon, due to it's slightly wobbly path around us here on Earth. This libration effect has made the lunar sea Mare Humboldtianum visible behind the crater Endymion. The slight fuzziness of the image is because the jet stream was over us again, which resulted in not so good seeing conditions. Also I was looking through a fairly large air mass. It was taken with the society's Imaging Source DBK camera using a 2x barlow lens, on a Celestron 9.25". I tilted the camera and overlaid two images that were quite close. Each image was a composite of several hundred movie frames, stacked in Registax 5.1. For fun (heh, geek fun) I also made a colour version, where I corrected the colour cast, blurred the hue channel and ramped up the saturation.

Ring galaxy

Now here's a far away thing. NGC 5701. I heard this 'little' thing had a detached ring around it so I thought I'd add it to my itenerary one night imaging at the observatory. I got 13 pics of 30 seconds each at f/3 on the 20", and appropriate darks. I later applied some previously taken flats, which haven't done a perfect job. You can see a couple of dust doughnuts as I've had to ramp up the contrast of the shadows to show the faint ring around this galaxy. When I first looked at the images on my camera, I was a little disappointed to see just a normal spindle-like shape, but an interesting bar across the middle nevertheless. There was no evidence of a ring among the light pollution. Even after stacking the images, it had to be teased out in the process of processing, so I'm presenting this image with camera readout stripes and 'noise' across it just so you can see this fascinating feature. The galaxy is classified as an SBOa-R (R for ring), and the central core comprises of some tightly wound spiral arms. The ring is just connected to the central part of the galaxy at one point, not easy to see in this picture. This galaxy would be an ideal candidate for the Atik when it is higher.

CME

I popped over the obs. this afternoon and did some imaging of the sun with the Gordon-cam, a portable DBK colour camera designed to run in planetary video imaging mode. This was attached to our Coronado 40mm Solar Max Hydrogen-alpha telescope. I aimed for 1000 frames per video. For this image, I adjusted the exposure/gain to make red saturated & exposed for flares, and green nearly saturated & exposed for surface detail. Even though green should not be detecting light in H-alpha imaging there will be some transmission of red light through the green filters on the camera's sensor. Very useful - 2 exposures in 1, and a nice coloured picture. Oh and I had to de-interlace the picture and reaverage the even and odd rows, then sharpen, which could be fixed with a monochrome sensor (DMK). I just thought I'd post this as the Sun looked surprisingly detailed, with a Coronal Mass Ejection 10-15 earth diameters long. In this image, celestial north should be up, so solar north should be tilted according to the ecliptic angle of about 20 degrees clockwise. As the solar x-ray activity was low, I wasn't expecting much, and was really surprised to visually see these huge stripes across the sun, and a healthy load of flare activity around the limb.

Mars in the galaxy den.

I'd known about this conjunction of Mars and some galaxies for a while, but I missed the close pass due to cloud and caught this wider grouping with a telephoto lens. I got 16 1 minute shots by piggybacking the camera on the society's 9" SCT, on the EQ5 mount, unguided. Unfortunately, my 400mm f/6.3 lens is a tad old and scratched and not really up to the job. But!... I've managed to get an early picture of the Supernova in M95. Pic was taken March 18th, before I'd even heard about it. I'd since seen M95 in an 8" scope at a star party and wondering whether any of those stars were supernovae. I've stuck a little postage stamp sized pic I took of M95 in 2010 next to the galaxy, just to prove it is the supernova. It's a weird picture, containing a strange, abberant and colourful reflection of Mars's light from the lens. I quite like the aesthetic effect of the extreme orange starburst around Mars. I've captured galaxies down to magnitude 14, but they are all faint smudges at best using this equipment.