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.

Heavenly lights

Hello, not blogged for a while so looking through my memory stick I found this one of a recent conjunction. In this scene, the lighting of Norwich cathedral is revealed in all its heavenly glory, shining up into the heavens themselves. Viewed from St James's Hill, the Roman Catholic cathedral appears prominently to the right of the cathedral, and to the right of that the "considerately" lit Sportspark pitches. The Sportspark is not actually part of the University of East Anglia, only by location and name and hence it is not subject to any environmental considerations, just economic ones. In fact, you can't see the Sportspark, because it is over 3 miles away. The general ochre glow in this contrast-enhanced picture contrasts with the natural bluish glow of the moonlight and faint twilight. On the 26th of January 2012, when this picture was taken, Venus was graced by the presence of the crescent moon (upper right of the cathedral). The crescent cannot be discerned because of the contrast enhancement, but the Earthlight reflected back from the dark side of the moon gives a sharp circular edge to the upper left of the moon. A rather aesthetically pleasing composition captured in a few seconds.

Deimos

Look what I caught the other night! A little tiny rock called Deimos, floating around Mars. I hadn't seen any pictures of this taken from earth, and didn't know whether it was possible for our home made scope. I checked it out prior to travelling down the "obs" and saw there was a faint background star. I wondered why I wasn't able to stack the images properly until I realised Mars and its little moons were being dragged across the sky too quickly. I got a second image in the video camera showing the moon had moved away from the star as predicted. You can't beat that for proof. Deimos is a dark asteroid like moon less than 10 miles across. It's like seeing a city as far away as Mars! All of this totally obscured by the glare from the planet itself. I was lucky it was between the diffraction spikes. I only saw it after averaging the photos - it is the inner dot, right of the slightly trailed dot close to Mars. I overlayed a set of 1/3200 second exposures on top of a set of 1 second exposures, at ISO 400 on the modified Canon 1000D. Right, now for Phobos - even closer. I'm really not sure that will be possible, but I'm gonna give it a shot with what I've got.

The Orion Nebula

Dwarfingly large billows of fluorescent hydrogen smoke glow from the intense ultraviolet radiation emitted from the stars that lie in the centre of this nebula. Blue wisps envelop the chasm that has been sculpted by their radiation pressure. Deep blue emission is caused by the atomic line of the hydrogen atom, where the electron quantum jumps between levels n=4 and n=2. On top of this, larger molecules drift and float about and reflect the bluish starlight from the central trapezium of hot stars. Among the larger molecules we call 'dust' many stars are being born. Infra red space telescopes can penetrate this dust to reveal the stars in the process of creation via nuclear ignition, driven by the gravitational collapse of leagues of dust molecules. A thousand or so years later this light hits my camera for a few minutes. Cool ... literally freezing, but with a hot centre.

Big comet floats into view

As you can see, I can't fit the 2 lovely tails of (2009 P1) Comet Garradd into the field of view of the Atik camera on the 20" scope. I limited the total exposure duration to about 7 mins, but there is still some movement of the comet. The faint fan of tails to the bottom (~west) is just visible, and the big slightly redder coloured anti tail goes up. I think it's about time I tried a picture of this on a smaller scope. This picture was taken at 23:00 on Feb 19th 2012. This comet looks set to put on a nice show for us in the northern hemisphere, as it's now up all night.

More Quasar Madness

A double quasar... Whatever next! I can't work out why it is blue.

Quasar madness.

This is not just an 18th magnitude dot. This 'dot' has a red shift of 3.21. That means it is currently 21.6 billion light years away, but it appears in our past 11.7 billion light years away. That's totally messed up when you can't even say how far away it is. It takes far away things to another level. It is a Quasar, a galaxy with a central super massive black hole jet pointing straight at us. I can't express how bright this thing is other than to say that it has an absolute magnitude of -30.0. OK, well I'll have a go. Hang on, I'll get my calculator out... If the quasar was at a distance of, say, the Pleiades star cluster is from Earth, it would appear nine times brighter than the Sun is to us on Earth (caveat: that's probably not an appropriate distance for the calculation). Our universe is only 13.7 billion years old and you're looking back across most of that time, to a time when not only the Earth didn't exist, but the Sun also didn't even exist!

Mars

Mars is becoming visible again at long last! Here's a picture from the lovely clear night of Saturday 14th January 2012. Picture taken about 00:30 UT 15 Jan 2012, via a DBK colour camera taking 30 seconds worth of 30 frames per sec at 1/109 second exposure, a 2x Barlow lens, on the 20" scope, masked down to 8". 450 pictures were chosen and stacked, sharpened, and a tweak was made to the blue and green channels to compensate for the difference in focus between these colours. Well that's what I did. I'm amazed how much detail I got given the conditions and fact that Mars is tiny! It is a mere 10.2 arc seconds across, or about 180 x smaller in angular extent than the moon. It is half the diameter of earth, 4200 miles, at a distance of about 83 million miles away. You can see Syrtis Major on the left, the large Hellas basin above it, which is near the south pole. Mare Erythraeum is the dark patch at top, the light gap at top right is Chryse, followed by Mare Acidalia. The large area at centre is Arabia Terra. Below Syrtis Major, is Utopia (just at edge), Boreo Syrtis, Protonilus and then a stretching dark finger along the bottom right, Deuteronilus. The light area at bottom right is Vastitas Borealis (North at bottom).

More delights of Orion

The chocolate box of Orion contains a selection of objects from visible to photographic beauties. The area around Alnitak (ζ Orionis) is particularly striking with a good telephoto lens. This particular lens has produced a couple of new nebulae via internal starlight reflections. The spike at top left is Alnilam trying to peek into the edge of the shot. I piggybacked my modified 1000D camera on the club's 9 1/4" scope on a CG5 mount and without guiding, got some 2 minute exposures through an old f/6.3 400mm lens. The RA drive had a wobble with a 10 minute period, causing most of the pics to be slightly trailed, but I managed to stack 12 of them with a combining method that minimised trails. So, here I present 24 minutes of exposure centred on the dark cloud called the Horsehead nebula B33, which protrudes against the hydrogen-red background of IC 434. The blue reflection nebulae NGC 2023 and IC435 can be seen below the horse, shining from within the sooty cloud. The more yellow or pinkish Flame nebula, NGC 2024, appears attached to the other side of Alnitak, and this can be seen, albeit dimly, in telescopes much more easily than IC 434. The grapefruit like colour tells us that it is not exclusively shining in hydrogen red light and there must be some cosmic dust scattering component to its colour, rendering it visible to human night vision.

The Perseus Cloud

A dim patch of light emerges from the dark cloud in southern Perseus. This is NGC 1333. I thought I'd have a second try at this object with my modified camera on the 20". I had a good dark night when the object was quite high and plenty of light gathering power. It was a bit of a struggle getting good auto-guiding, as it is a dark cloud and there are not many bright stars nearby to guide on. I did a bit of masking and selectively blurring the dim nebulosity, in order to try to smooth out the background, but started to get into 8-bit processing artefacts. In the final image (33 x 30second & darks, flats, etc.), reddened stars abound in the dark cloud, and the blue reflection nebulosity fades into the darkness around the edges. A few dark lanes cross the nebula and a few spots of activity show up dotted off to one edge. The large dark cloud crosses the centre of the image and background stars appear to peek out to the right edge. The width of this picture is similar to that of the moon.

Breckland Skies in Winter

I love the return of these beautiful constellations on freezing cold nights. It was dropping well below freezing and as I looked south out of the dome at Breckland Astronomical Society I could see stars right down to the horizon. There was one star especially low down below the constellation Lepus, which I recognised as Pheat, from Columba the Dove. I couldn't see the other two stars near it - but I grabbed the Canon and gorilla pod and clamped it onto the edge of the dome, pointing south. I found I could fit in all of Canis Major and Orion with the standard lens set to wide. I processed to reduce a bit of the background glow, but it was much stronger towards the horizon. An odd cloud was floating through Columba, which I could see. It wasn't moving fast, and appeared pretty small, but it managed to smear out on this image. There were a few high clouds drifting by which I could only see on the photographs. The camera managed 21 good 15 second shots before the battery ran out of juice in the cold and I stacked them in Deep Sky Stacker. Hence the motion blur across the southern horizon. If you look closely you can see the red R Leporis off the upper right of the main pattern of Lepus, next to a whiter star for comparison. I have not processed to show the Rosette, Horsehead, Flame and Orion nebula.

NGC 40

Here's a pretty little stellar remnant that's visible in average telescopes most of the year from the UK. NGC 40, which can be found in Northern Cepheus, shows up very red on film, but is blue in appearance even in large telescopes. Due to this bright redness it shows up very quickly on camera. I got a handful of pictures of 30 second duration, some 10 second and some 3 second, stacked them, then averaged and sharpened them. I think it looks quite a flowery little nebula.

The Intergalactic Wanderer

The intergalactic wanderer (NGC 2419) is actually not wandering. It is in a 3 billion year orbit around the Milky Way, which takes it further away than the Magellanic Clouds. It's currently 275 000 ly from us and 300 000 ly from the milky way's centre. I remember reading some notes in"Cirque du Ciel" (actually Cartes du Ciel) that the individual stars are 17th magnitude. Some facts about it don't square with me. I read that this globular is huge, and compares to omega centari (see recent posts), which has millions of stars. It is intrinsically very bright in total and appears as a 9th magnitude fuzz in the scope. But the individual stars must be 17 or so magnitudes below that (because 17 magnitudes = a factor of 6.3 million in brightness), more like 26th mag. Perhaps there is a huge range of brightnesses and the brightest ones around 17th magnitude. It is a big, big thing a long, long way away in any case! I wonder if it can sense the dark matter halo? The cluster lies in the direction of Lynx, near the twin stars Castor and Pollux from our humble perspective. I did a colour blur on this image and upped the saturation, sharpened a bit to make it all pretty. I suspect the colour went a little bit crazy along the way, but I love those colourful, spiky starbursts.

Spooky, Nebulous Fingers.

WE pointed the twenty inch at the Eastern Sky, so we could get a nice long exposure without rotation. Rising nice and high is the constellation Auriga, the charioteer, and in its centre lie some interesting patches of nebulosity. The "spooky, nebulous fingers" in this photo are otherwise known as the central part of IC405. There's a nice bright guide star here for us. I got 30 minutes worth of luminance, colour and dark images, using the Atik at -20 C, binning 3x3. I stacked in MaximDL then processed by blurring the colour frames, aligning and colour combining. An auto flat overdid things, so I averaged the autoflat corrected frame with a copy of the uncorrected frame. Next, I ran Digital Development and liked the contrasty effect, so I did the same thing with this. I couldn't mamange to get bright colours, they just don't seem to be there in this object. I think nebula filters Ha OIII Hb are the way to go! I did a small manual detrail using 'layers' and 'darken' on it to get round stars. This object is also somewhere in my past blog. Hopefully this pic is an improvement.

The Lagoon and The Trifid Nebulae

Four 5 minute exposures of a favourite region of sky of astronomers was enough to produce this wonderfully colourful and stunning scene. The Lagoon nebula (Messier 8) is below centre, and you can see red hydrogen gas extending out to the left of it. Around that is a dark, twisty channel, with some strange tight turns. That is in turn blocking out the light from the myriad stars of the central milky way in the background. A short hop celestially north lies the trifid nebula (M20), which shows its beautiful colour contrast, and the star cluster M21 appears above that. The darkness to the right is merely apparent due to the blocking of star light by tiny aggregations of molecules, spread thinly, but over such a large volume they collectively cut out virtually all what we see. Other wavelengths of radiation, such as infra red, can shine through these clouds. The 'visible' wavelengths between 0.4 and 0.7 μm were captured with a Canon 1000D with the nearIR-red filter removed, through a Sigma telephoto zoom lens at focal length ~ 300mm, on a well aligned Astrotrak.

Nebulae in Norma

When I was collecting my stellar photons from those sparkly, southern skies last summer I rushed back into my little warm chalet to process the photos. I discovered a new nebula in Norma! Well it had been there all along, but I like to think that. It's a personal discovery. It looks like a swooping giant bird. Apparently it is called NGC 6188, and there is another planetary like nebula towards its north west (upper right), which appears as a fuzzy star on my poor resolution picture. You can see zeta Scorpii at the top, along with another one of my personal discoveries, namely a big faint red patchy ring around the whole cluster. Actually come to think of it, the whole picture is teaming with my new 'personal' discoveries. Dark, straight lines. Who said nature doesn't like straight lines? a physics teacher? Well my last few years of astrophotography have shown me many rows of stars in lines that are too straight to be chance alignments. There are a sequence of giant (I mean HUGE and capitalisation of the letters really is quite an understatement), dark, frigid clouds across the picture. Also, there seems to be a tinge more redness down towards where the tree has made its impression on the moving stack of photos that went into producing this image, but that could easily be an artefact of the processing. The atmopheric extinction of starlight shows up with the lack of light pollution, at such high contrast.

The void

Sorry for not posting for a short while. I've been looking into the void. Unfortunately, I was aiming for the diffuse irregular galaxy IC 1613 in Cetus (/Pisces) and I synchronised the telescope on the wrong star. It wasn't far away, but instead I got an 11 minute picture of the star Hipparcos 5166 and the brightest object of interest in the field was a distant 16.88(blue) magnitude galaxy NPM1G+02.0042 . I haven't even heard of that catalog. I decided to look up the galaxy on deep sky browser (http://www.messier45.com/). That's what you get when you look in the wrong direction in the vastness of the cosmos. Nothing. (Well that is if you ignore all those stars).
All this despite the lovely, considerate ("health and safety") lighting the neighbouring village hall provides for their car park (and the local few cubic miles of sky). I have spoken to them about this, but they are in no hurry to change or reposition the lights. What a situation for an astronomical society... when you can't control your local light pollution.

Our society's new "star camp" venture

Here's Cygnus the Swan and Delphinus the Dolphin setting over trees at my society's new star camp site. Unfortunately, the night I choose to camp out with my telescope was the mistiest night of the year. Still, this scene looked rather lovely. This is a composite of 13 images of the constellations setting in the west, in the wee hours.

ζ Scorpii

Embedded deep in the centre of the milky way is a stunning stellar asterism around the star ζ (zeta) Scorpii. Here I show the area in four levels of magnification taken with various optical pieces of equiment, while in La Palma. The wide view was produced by continuously taking 15 second pics on a little tripod, through a 50mm f/1.4 lens. The next level was 2 minute exposures through a telephoto lens on a low zoom atop an Astrotrak platform that wasn't quite aligned, at f/3. The following image was produced from 4 x 5-minute exposures at nearly full zoom that were possible once the Astrotrak had been aligned. The last picture is a mosaic of two 5 minute pictures taken through a guided 4-inch vixen refractor, using an astronomy-modified Canon 350D.

Space ripples.

Here's take 2 on an object I virtually started my blog with. That's 200 posts ago. Yes, it's yet another big swirly nebulous thing! 6 x 2 minute exposures on the 20" newtonian at f/3 (focal reduced) with my astro modified Canon 1000D. Then I went back on a moonlit night, reassembled my focal reducer and got some flat fields. They made all the difference, even just as jpegs, which are pre-processed. Andy, you seriously have to try that man, it's a gas. You can see where I had to do my detrailing trick on the stars at the right hand side. This picture demonstrates the reason why you shouldn't expose for over a minute on a flipping "alt-az" when it's pointing high. Field rotation is the reason I focal reduce an already f/5 scope. I have over blurred the fainter regions in processing so I can enhance the contrast just a little bit more. The pretty object is a supernova remnant and what you are seeing is shock fronts as ripples expanding from what I guess is now a black hole or an inactive neutron star, but no one has been able to see much, just a little bit of hot metallic plasma. It all happened just a few thousand years ago, plus the 1500 years or so that it took the light to reach us.

By Jove!

We stayed up on a crisp, clear night until the dazzling Jupiter rose high in the South at our observatory. We put our cameras on the 20" scope and spent ages tweaking focus and getting sequences of shots. I settled on covering the scope with an 8" mask, positioned at the lower end of the aperture to minimse the seeing distortions. This helps by matching the aperture scale with that of the atmospheric turbulent cells. We got a dimmer, but much sharper picture. I grabbed forty 1/50" exposures using a 2x barlow on this set up, to give an overall focal length of 4.8m at 0.2m aperture = f/24. I used large jpeg format on the Canon EOS 1000D(mod). I stacked 39 in Registax and upon wavelet sharpening, it revealed this wonderful detail. I had some trouble using Registax that wasted many hours, but I got there. Still, I didn't manage to select only the best quality pictures, so all got stacked. The highlight of this night was peering into the eyepiece and seeing the sharpness of the storms, belts, the light pink GRS, and best of all... the moons appeared as sharp disks! I was blown away!

The Jones Nebula

This is Jones 1. I got a good shot of it in my early days at Breckland Astro Soc. And again, on wednesday night this wipsy planetary nebula was picked up with some 30 second shots on the Atik 383L. I combined about 15 luminance (70% weighting) with 4 of each colour. The Red images showed virtually nothing. A very blue-green large puff of gas, with the central star the bluish one of the little asterism that has gathered there. The star is a white dwarf which is pumping out ultraviolet radiation that is being somehow absorbed by oxygen ions (with two electrons missing), and re-emitted at that turquoise wavelength of around 500nm that our eyes are particularly good at seeing at night. This thing is visible in a large scope, but only just. It lives directly above the square of Pegasus (well it does in my mind anyway).

Bubble, (Hubble?), Toil and Trouble.

Well it was no toil or trouble last night to attach my modified DSLR to the 20" scope and collect some pretty pictures of the Bubble Nebula NGC 76-somethingorother (I'm getting lazy). - Sorry, NGC 7635. I want to learn all my NGCs but there are too many - some don't even exist! And this picture is certainly nothing like a Hubble view, not even a Hubble palette (which I don't find aesthetically very pleasing). However, it's my best shot of this thing yet, I have posted this object before. I thought I'd go back to DSLRing, for convenience, rather than persevering with the monochrome CCD. It was just 26 pictures and 13 darks at 30 seconds each at ISO 1600, and I was enjoying a cup of coffee during the continuous exposures, of which I rejected none. Nice when everything works!

The cold dark world Nereid.

I blew up the contrast on my picture comprising 18 1-minute exposures on the Neptune area, taken on Sep 4-5, and aligned it with an adjusted Deep Sky Survey image of the same area of sky(inset). I flicked between them and saw a dot where Nereid was. Starry night pro was a bit wrong, but Redshift had Nereid in the correct place. This is a tiny moon!!! 18.7 mag. My photometric measurements showed it to be 18.9 mag. The main moon Triton (hardly visible in most telescopes) is bright and merged into the glare of Neptune in this picture.

200!

Congratulations, me! This is post number 200! It just happens to be Barnard's galaxy. I thought we would be rid of opportunities to photograph things in Sagittarius before long, so, on an extremely rare evening when it was actually clear almost to the horizon, I took the opportunity to capture some faint, weird stuff with the Atik CCD camera. This weird stuff is a local, irregular dwarf galaxy, but if you look towards the bottom of the picture you can see three blobs of nebulosity, the one on the left looking like a ring. I haven't researched this object much, I just relish its obscurity.

A long time ago, in a galaxy...

21 million years ago to be exact. Here's the thing everyone's raving about at the moment. It's when the light from this big bang, in a nearISH galaxy reached Earth. By ISH I mean 1,300,000,000,000 times further away than the sun. I think I spotted it in binoculars. Image from Sep 2 22:00UT. It's rather bright as these things go. It started when a white dwarf star sucks mass of its partner, which causes an instability. That leads to violent nuclear reactions, which cause an incredible shockwave that we are seeing now.

ρ Ophiuchi

This area looks like a child's painting. It's amazing how something so colourful formed out there on the border of Scorpius and Ophiuchus. It's just 4 x 4 minute pictures through a telephoto lens, looking at an area about the size of the palm of your hand at arm's length. Everything just happened to be in this one place: reflection nebula (top), dark nebula (left), hydrogen emission (right), a red giant (bottom), globular clusters, milky way. Wow! The red giant sitting at the bottom of the picture is Antares and it truly is a huge star. It is 8 HUNDRED times wider than our sun, and about 10 THOUSAND times brighter. It lights up the whole cloud with an orange glow! It is far wider than Mars's orbit. Next to it from our perspective is the globular cluster M4, which of course lies much further away. Personally I like how the star at the right (sigma Scorpii) is blue, yet is surrounded by gas that is fluorescing red. A fainter red emission cloud can be found off the bottom (south) edge of the picture. The maddest thing about this object is that it is REAL. This is a real place, just as real as the chair you are (probably) sitting on as you are reading this. Sure, it is a few hundred light years away and we happen to have a particularly nice line of sight of it, but it consitutes a lot more 'stuff' to the universe than little planet Earth.