So we have the first Image of the Month for 2013 – Happy New Year 🙂
This one is a fairly new image taken at the beginning of last month – but for me and the New Forest Observatory it is something of a landmark image. This is of course Kemble’s Cascade in the constellation Camelopardalis and it represents the first real opportunity for the mini-WASP array to show its stuff. Taken in a single evening this is a 2-framer of the region so it is clear that the ability to use several scopes in parallel for imaging pays off in being able to acquire data that would have previously taken me several (good clear) nights – and we know how rare those are.
The mini-WASP array in its current incarnation comprises one Sky 90 and two TS 80mm triplet APOs, each with its own M26C 10-megapixel one-shot colour CCD camera. With all three systems running I can grab 3-hour’s worth of total integration time for just one hour’s worth of total imaging time. The Sky 90 also has a filter wheel and H-alpha, H-beta, SII and OIII filters for grabbing narrow band data while the two TS 80s grab the RGB template. Once I get used to handling this beast we shall start to see some new and unique imagery coming out of the New Forest Observatory and the Parker-Carboni deep-sky imaging factory. This is going to be a really interesting year for the NFO 🙂
