A couple of nights back we had an extremely rare clear, Moonless night.  Gremlins were at work as I have hardly used the kit in almost a year – never mind.  Managed to get 4 x 30-minute subs on the Belt of Orion using the 200mm lenses and the Trius M26C OSC CCDs.

As there were only 4 subs the image is very noisy and the stacker doesn’t get rid of plane trails when 2 of the 4 subs have plane trails on them.  However, what this image does show is that the framing of the Belt is just about perfect with the 200mm lenses and if I ever see another clear, Moonless night, I am going to have to return to this and get a load more subs.

Got just 9 x 20-minute subs on the NGC1999 region last night using the Sky 90 array.

Forgot just how many geostationaries swarm through this region.

First “proper” image of this season. 21 x 30-minute subs on IC348 (in Perseus) on the 3 x Sky 90 array. It clearly needs even more exposure time to both reduce the noise and bring out more of the brown stuff.

Managed to get today’s EPOD with an image of Arcturus – the brightest star in the Northern Celestial Hemisphere.

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work.

 

Not exactly deep-sky stuff, but it is my other main hobby.  This is a 3D printed 5th order Menger Sponge, 180mm along an edge, printed on an Anet A6 3D printer using Rigid.Ink white PLA filament.  346 hours of printing and 1.5kg of filament went into making this mathematical object.

Got today’s EPOD (number 97 for me) with an image of Romanesco Broccoli showing its Fractal structure.

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work.

http://epod.usra.edu/

 

This is what the Sun looked like today from the New Forest Observatory.

Apparently loads of Saharan dust and smoke from Iberian forest fires dragged up here by Ophelia.

Got today’s EPOD with 3 very special stars in a region close to the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus.

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work.

An extremely deep M45 image taken with the Sky 90s and M26C OSC CCDs. Over 25-hours total imaging time using 10, 20, and 30-minute sub-exposures. The image “cleaned-up” beautifully with Noel Carboni’s AstroFlat plugin.