The accompanying image made Picture of the Month in the March 2007 issue of Astronomy Now!  You can find this one on page 92.  The image taken with the Sky 90/M25C combination and shows the Cone Nebula, Christmas Tree cluster region in Monoceros.  The beautiful little golden open cluster at the bottom/centre of this image is designated Trumpler 5.  There was no additional H-alpha data taken for this image, something I shall attempt to do during Winter 2007.

Tags: Sky 90, SXVF-M25C

Tom How over at Curdridge Observatory dropped me a note to say that he has just finished some interesting work with our image of M81 [Bode’s Nebula].  We produced our single frame Hyperstar image with the SXV-H9C one-shot colour cmaera which gave us a reasonably large field of view (FOV) of one degree by three-quarters of a degree.

Once again they have used our image as a chrominance layer with their own image as a luminance layer and once again the result looks great. 

Make sure you take a look at the original M81 Bodes Nebula Image by Tom How at Curdridge Observatory.  Tom’s image is on the left and our image is on the right.

Tags: Sky 90, SXV-H9C

Fantastic! Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD) have chosen our extremely deep image of the Pleiades open star cluster taken on the Sky 90/SXVF-M25C as today’s picture.

This is the famous Pleiades open star cluster in the constellation Taurus, also known as Messier object 45 (M45). The arrival of this familiar star cluster in the evening sky is a precursor of winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Sky 90, SXVF-M25C

Faith Eckersall has written a great article for the February issue of the Dorset Society Magazine titled “Twinkle, twinkle” using a set of Hyperstar/SXV-H9C images.  If you see the magazine, you will find the article on pages 48-49.

Managed to get a few good images these last couple of months (despite the terrible weather).  However, this one was above expectations.

A total of over a dozen hours exposure using 15 minute and 5 minute RGB subs as well as 1,000 second H-alpha subs not to mention over a dozen hours of image processing by Noel Carboni in Florida, U.S.A.

This is probably the best image we’ve turned out so far.

Usual equipment, Sky 90 telescope with an SXVF-M25C CCD, Maxim DL for data acquisition, autoguiding, colour conversion and stacking.

Hope you like the surreal image…

Tags: Sky 90, SXVF-M25C