You can now see the current status of the Star Vistas project on the new Star Vistas website. Read the rest of this entry »

Work the next day, so of course Sunday 27th July was perhaps the best summer’s night I’ve ever seen from this location for imaging.  O.K. so it’s headache day for Monday!  Started imaging this one at around 11.00 p.m. and finished around 2.00 a.m.  The Scutum star cloud stood out brightly against an already bright Milky Way – unbelievable!  And as I finished imaging the Moon just started to pop up over my NE horizon – a perfect night’s imaging (very unusual!).

Noel has just finished processing this little beauty so up it goes straight onto the NFO site!  Globular cluster M71 with an accompanying little open cluster [OCL116, Harvard20] and Gamma Sagitta in the top left hand corner.  Throughout the whole field of view is a Milky Way backdrop.  Enjoy the trip!

Well I did manage to get out on the evening of the 20th, even though it was work the next day, and I spent a couple of hours imaging the beautiful open cluster M39 in Cygnus. Read the rest of this entry »

Dean of Starizona is very much on the ball.  He just informed me that the problem I had last night was probably due to me putting the cog on the FeatherTouch the wrong way round.  I just went out to the observatory in the twilight and found that (as per usual) Dean was quite right!  I have now reversed the cog and it’s all systems go – thank you Dean!!!

 Looks like it may actually start off clear tonight, would do wouldn’t it with work tomorrow – but I must give this brilliant new system a trial if at all possible.  I’ll aim for a cluster in the Milky Way so I can keep to short subs and a short overall exposure time. I’m  now going to try and grab an hours kip.

I had a two-hour, cloud-free slot last night between 11.00 p.m. and 1.00 a.m.  Bound to be clear with a blazing (full?) Moon trundling along the southern horizon.  O.K. so not a good night for imaging, but it did give me my first chance at firing up the Starizona autofocusing setup for the FeatherTouch focuser.  Learn from my experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Taken earlier this year, Noel has just finished processing one of the few single star images taken using the Sky 90/SXVF-M25C combination.  This time it is the bright star Regulus.  If you invert the image colours (to pick up the faint stuff) you’ll just make out the dwarf Leo I galaxy lying directly to the left (and very close to) Regulus itself.

Great news again!  The Parker/Carboni double-team got their rendition of the Jellyfish Nebula region in this month’s Astronomy Now as Picture of the Month!!  Thank you once again to Nik Szymanek for a very nice accompanying description.

A higher resolution version of the first light NGC7000 image taken on the version III Hyperstar can now be viewed on Starizona’s Hyperstar Imaging Site.

The evening of thursday 3rd July was clear and Moonless – and was also first light for the new Hyperstar lens for the C11 telescope 🙂 Read the rest of this entry »