As it has not been imaging weather recently I have had a lot of time to both look over old images in more detail and to process a few old images that never got looked at in the first place. Whilst looking at some old data which I thought was worthless (it was Hyperstar III/M25C data taken in the wrong region) I found something very interesting! The image should have been NGC1333 in Perseus, but the finder scope hadn’t been put back into its proper place after doing a bit of DSLR piggy-back photography, so I didn’t get NGC1333. However, I was still in Perseus, and I got 48 subs at 6-minutes per sub of a fairly uninteresting Perseus star field under almost perfect imaging conditions. I remember being extremely annoyed at the time that I had wasted nearly 5-hours of great imaging time imaging in the wrong place – but now looking at the image again I can see it wasn’t such a waste of time. I am clearly picking up the swathes of dust in the region, something that I have only recently been aware of due to Rogelio’s superb work. WOW – that is a bit impressive from street light polluted Brockenhurst, and it brought back home to me the extreme photon grabbing power of the Hyperstar III on the C11 – something the mini-WASP array simply cannot match (even though it has 4x the field of view of the Hyperstar/C11). I took the Hyperstar III off a couple of months back and set up to do f#10 imaging which was certainly challenging and great fun. BUT – I simply had not appreciated that the Hyperstar III wasn’t redundant with the commissioning of the mini-WASP – on the contrary, it might be very useful to have the Hyperstar also contribute data to that acquired by the mini-WASP, especially for the really faint stuff!! So what’s the revelation? Obviously the Hyperstar III is going straight back onto the C11 first thing tomorrow – and this time it is staying on – for good 🙂 O.K. so I get a bit frustrated when I fire up for an evening’s imaging and find that the collimation has shifted (because the mirror has shifted) – but I think that is a frustration I am simply going to have to deal with – the Hyperstar III/C11 is simply far too powerful an imaging setup not to have there ready to image at a moment’s notice. The Hyperstar is back yet again 🙂 🙂
