First light for the new Hyperstar lens from Starizona

The evening of thursday 3rd July was clear and Moonless – and was also first light for the new Hyperstar lens for the C11 telescope 🙂It was a beautiful summer evening, didn’t really get dark (even at 2.00 a.m. !!) and comfortably warm.  Collimating the new Hyperstar was a doddle now that I have CCDInspector, and without spending too much time on the collimation (I was itching to get imaging) I still managed to end up with x and y values of +0.1″ and -0.1″ which is the best I used to get on the Sky 90 with the M25C.  I know that if I’d spent another 20-minutes or so I could have easily achieved the perfect +0.0″ +0.0″, but will save that pleasure for the next outing.

 I got the system focused up (manually using an old electric focuser) on Vega and took a couple of 30-second shots on this star before moving on to a deep-sky target.  I chose NGC7000, the North America nebula, as it was in a good position and also because it is one of my favourites.

The result below is for just 56-minutes total exposure time using the Hyperstar!  This is equivalent to 6-hours with the Sky 90/M25C.  Noel has just finished processing this one, and I had to immediately post it up here for you all to see.  The Hyperstar has returned to the New Forest Observatory – and this new model is simply better than ever – the first light results speak for themselves.

 My summer 2008 mega-project was (and still is) a 4-framer of the whole of the North America and Pelican nebulae.  This is going to be achieved so much easier now I have the Hyperstar – it would have been another marathon (like the 32-hour Veil nebula) with the Sky 90.  The Hyperstar will remain on the C11 for a long time to come 🙂