Noel completed Star Vistas late last night, and this was the final image to be prepared for publication.  This is IC443 the Jellyfish nebula, and IC444 is the large emission nebula (which also contains a reflection nebula and a very small planetary nebula) to its left, both are in Gemini.  This image comprises 3 hours of RGB, 9 hours and 40 minutes of H-alpha, and 3 hours and 40 minutes of SII.

Noel Carboni has literally just completed the last fine adjustments on the new deep-sky coffee-table book - Star Vistas.  He is now assembling the high-resolution version ready to send off to Springer.  We are hoping for publication early 2009.  I am now going to crack open a bottle of Champagne :)  Well done Noel!

I had a great evening in Clanfield last night with the Hampshire Astronomical Group who made me [the wife and the dog] most welcome.  If you are invited along by HAG to give a talk, I can highly recommend you go - very friendly, and very interesting meeting

I am giving a seminar to the Hampshire Astronomical Group at the Clanfield Memorial Hall tonight at 7.45 p.m.  You will be able to purchase signed copies of “Making Beautiful Deep-Sky Images” at a reduced rate.  See you there

It is clear the way my time is going that I am never going to complete my book “Game Over” which describes the end of our computer generated “reality”. Read the rest of this entry »

Noel Carboni is putting the finishing touches to Star Vistas as this post goes out, and he created this deep-space masterpiece from a collection of old NFO data.  The appropriately named Heart Nebula is a favourite target for Northern-Hemisphere amateur astroimagers.

This image was taken later in the evening on the 6th May, just before Mercury got lost in the purple mush at the bottom of the picture.

A nice astrophoto-opportunity arose on the 6th May 2008 - in the twilight sky, beautiful Mercury lay very close to a new Moon.  In a big departure from my normal astrophotography - I took the accompanying image with the Canon 40D and a 28-200 mm zoom lens.  With 10-subs at 4-seconds per sub - I only wish standard deep-sky imaging was as straightforward as this.

There are a superb pair of galaxies that are ideally positioned during May for imaging, and I find myself drawn back to them year after year.  The galaxies are M81, also known as Bode’s galaxy and M82, also known as the Cigar galaxy, both residing in Ursa Major.  M81 lies at a distance of 4.5 million light years and shines at magnitude 6.9, whereas M82 is about 17 million light years away and is a rather faint magnitude 8.4.  M81 is a nice spiral galaxy, whereas M82 (also known as Arp 337 a unique Arp galaxy, and NGC 3034) is a strange cigar-shaped irregular galaxy associated with an arc of three magnitude 20 quasars, and a peculiar jet of filaments (which show up very well under H-alpha) emanating from the nucleus.  There’s plenty more yet in this region! Read the rest of this entry »

Well our definitive version of M31 with all the added H-alpha made Picture of the Month in the May 2008 issue of Astronomy Now.  Thank you Nik Szymanek for the very nice accompanying write-up