Yesterday I received the best news I’ve had in a really long time - I’ve been granted early retirement from the University – YIPPEEEEEE!!

I can now pursue all my interests without the incessant distraction of the day job

I’ve just seen my comments on the IOM post below and strangely enough I have just put the Sky 90 back on the C11 for some wide field narrowband imaging.  We’ll see if I can bag CTB1 this year

Cassiopeia as you will know is open cluster central – but do you know that there is a region THICK with open clusters (6 of them) AND it has a fantastic supernova remnant as well?  Use your scope’s GOTO to go to NGC7790 or NGC7788 in Cassiopeia – get a decent field of view – and take a very long total exposure with long subs – you won’t regret it.

This special area was first brought to my attention by Eddie Guscott in his Practical Astronomer magazine [August 2008, pages 22-24] in a great little article called “Six little clusters, all in a row….”  The six little clusters comprise King 12, Harvard 21, Frolov 1, NGC7788, NGC7789 and Berkely 58 moving from north to south through this region.  It wasn’t however the “Six little clusters, all in a row” that caught my attention in the black and white image on page 23, what was that amazing object just making an appearance at the top of the page??  There was a semi-circular region of nebulosity, obviously part of a great circle of nebulosity – but what was it?  A little detective work showed that this was CTB1, a beautiful supernova remnant, brilliantly imaged by Steve Cannistra – I wanted this one!!  No problem – I have the Hyperstar – I can image ANYTHING – especially faint stuff, not actually true.  Even though I took very long sub exposures, and extremely long total exposures – I just couldn’t pull out CTB1 – even with Noel’s superb processing skills.  Why?  Because this one is getting close to my skyglow limiting background.  O.K. no problem – stick in an H-alpha filter and have another go.  Yes I did this, and found the problem with narrowband filters and low f# optical systems – they don’t go together!  O.K. no problem again – just get one of those wideband H-alpha filters and go for it again.  Well yes but the huge increase in bandwidth means you sacrifice a lot of contrast – and to be honest, you don’t actually gain a lot by going down this route with the Hyperstar system.  So what is to be done?  The only answer I have is to one day put the f#4.5 Sky 90 back on with a narrowband H-alpha filter and do the thing properly, but that may be a LONG time off.  Until then, just look at this rich region of open clusters – and better still – get imaging them.

The accompanying image is a mosaic of 3 Hyperstar III/SXVF-M25C frames and measures something like 3.5 x 24 degrees.  Sub-exposure times with the Hyperstar III went to over 10-minutes (!!!!) equivalent to over an hour with the Sky 90 – and total imaging time would be in excess of 20-hours.  One of my more impressive deep-sky imaging failures.  Why not see if you can do better and grab a really nice image of the little-known and rarely-imaged CTB1?

Until October – clear skies and happy imaging!!!

Last reminder before the big day – the Star Vistas Private Viewing at the ArtSway gallery opens at 6:00 p.m. on Friday 3rd September.  If you cannot make it on opening night, the Exhibition runs over the weekend.  At 7:00 p.m. on the 3rd I will give a short presentation on the Magic of Photography which includes high-speed photography, macro and micro work, as well as deep-sky images not on display in the Exhibition.  Hope to see you all there on the night

I just saw a very inspirational programme about Brian Duffy (a famous professional photographer) on BBC’s IPlayer.  Clearly Brian (who unfortunately died earlier this year) was a very bright man and his answers to the inane questions from the interviewer were intensely sharp and well-considered.  One of his answers is going to stick with me for the rest of my life, Brian said:  ”The work is the statement” – what an obvious (and quite brilliant!) observation.  Basically Brian was saying that a work of art, wherever displayed, creates its own statement.  A  great work of art needs no accompanying flowery prose to justify its existence.  In contrast – I am sure sure we have all visited Art Exhibitions where quite abysmal pieces of “artwork” have been accompanied by the most exquisite and carefully crafted prose in a vain attempt to give the work credibility and substance.

And talking of Exhibitions – please remember that the Star Vistas Exhibition opens on Friday 3rd September 2010 at the ArtSway gallery – where a portfolio of deep-sky images can be seen, sans flowery prose.  After all what words can possibly describe the mind-stretching wonders of the Cosmos?

Clear night last night – didn’t matter there was a blazing Moon up for setting up the Hyperstar III.  Managed to get good collimation quite quickly and then went on to re-train the focuser as so much had moved since I last did this I think the parameters were a little bit off.  So focuser retrained as well and all seems o.k.  Took a few short subs of Sadr to check nothing out of the ordinary – will process those shortly.  Also doesn’t seem to be any water vapour now in the CCD cavity (I had to take the M25C apart after the repair and warm everything up with a hair dryer before resealing the CCD).  So – hopefully it is now all systems go, ready and waiting for the next Hyperstar target.

Oh yes – there’s something of importance to Hyperstar owners.  When it comes to collimating your Hyperstar system, only pay attention to the numbers you get from CCDInspector and don’t worry too much about the central obstruction (the CCD) not being dead centre on an out of focus star in the centre of the CCD.  This just means the optical axis of the mirror is not dead centred (this is the case with my C11 anyway) and fortunately there’s enough “play” in the Hyperstar III to deal with this.

Flickr has changed how you link to your photos – I am just putting this in as a test to see what happens:

<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/12801949@N02/4863366848/” title=”Cocoon nebula in Cygnus by cybermystic, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4137/4863366848_7fcf82682e.jpg” width=”500″ height=”195″ alt=”Cocoon nebula in Cygnus” /></a>

With the current weather I have not been able to set up the repaired M25C for any imaging and I am aware of the days ticking past with nothing new to add   Still, this gives me a little time to sit down and plan the next phase of the mini-WASP array.  Unfortunately the mini-WASP will not be up and running for this winter, looks more likely that this will now be a winter 2011 first light.  I didn’t get the decking and concrete pillar base in ready for the observatory and I think it will now be spring next year before I get that part done, so this winter it will be Hyperstar III imaging only (which is no bad thing).  Got a few nice projects noted on the whiteboard – now I just need the weather to play ball.  Having said that, it is this time of the year that I have had a 3-month imaging break due to the weather on more than one occasion!

Returning to the mini-WASP project – this will need to go into its own observatory dome so that I can run both the Hyperstar III and mini-WASP systems at the same time.  The first phase of the mini-WASP will use 2 x Sky 90 scopes together with two of the new Starlight Xpress M26C one-shot colour cameras.  A Megrez 80 and SX guide camera will occupy one slot of the mini-WASP array for the guiding.

In phase II (unknown date!) two further Sky 90s and M26C cameras will be added to the two remaining mini-WASP ports and the Megrez removed altogether.  One of the Sky 90s will have an OAG (SX) for guiding.  So the final mini-WASP system will be a four Sky 90, four M26C system giving a field of view of 6 x 4 degrees (that takes into account the frame overlap) a sampling of 3 arc seconds per pixel and 40 megapixels of data per sub download (36 megapixels of non-overlapped data).  I think the final system will produce some quite impressive images

Copyright ITV Meridian News & Weather

It was great to have Simon Parkin and the Meridian TV crew visit the New Forest Observatory – they are a very professional outfit and they make live broadcasting appear so easy!  So once again, the familiar shape of the satellite van parked on the verge outside the NFO attracted the usual attention – it really is an incredible piece of high technology – a film studio on wheels with satellite broadcast capabilities – amazing.  Simon gave the weather report and had a few words with me about the current Perseid meteor shower.  At least, with all the cloud, it didn’t actually rain on us