This is last  night’s data taken between 11 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. on the Sky 90 array.  18 x 10-minute subs, and a star has been labelled for reference.  One bright asteroid in the FOV only clear in the averaged data.

Thank you Tom How of the Curdridge observatory for identifying the mystery asteroid at far right-centre as 729 Watsonia.

Another clear night last night, so I moved a bit downwards in the Virgo cluster to get the M87 region.  No sign of the jet as far as I can see with 14 x 5-minute subs.

Beautiful clear night last night, and a non-intrusive Moon for imaging in the Leo region.  12 x 5-minutes subs on the M100 region and the speed of the Hyperstar really shows through.  Need more data on this for a quality image, but this result is pretty acceptable for just one hour’s worth of imaging.

 

Today (19/03/2018) saw the publication of EPOD number 99 for me.

A big 2-frame panorama of the Bellatrix region with a large galaxy cluster on the right hand side of the frame.

Look out for EPOD number 100 next month.

Clear until 9:00 p.m. last night with a very intrusive Moon.  Saw that Ceres was well-placed in Cancer so put the Sky 90 array on the region.

Ended up with 18 x 15-minute subs.  Can even see Ceres in the SDMask stacked colour image as it is moving so slowly and is so bright (when I first saw it on the subs I thought it was a star as it was actually brighter than all the surrounding stars).  For orientation that is SAO61102 in the centre (guide star).

In the B&W image you can see there is another asteroid below Ceres (that isn’t on the Sky 6).  And it is also worth noting that Ceres is shown in the wrong position on the Sky 6 – call up the live Ephemeris on Ceres to get its actual position if you want to image it.

From last night, 21 x 10-minute subs on the Sky 90 array.  Blazing half Moon causing trouble but as it was a beautiful clear (bitterly cold) night I imaged anyway.  Couldn’t be bothered to process out the plane trail.

From last night, lovely blue Gomeisa or Beta Canis Majoris.  36 x 10-minute subs on the Sky 90 array – and yes the averaged data shows a very nice asteroid near the centre of the image.

Doesn’t look like we have a clear sky tonight so the run of clear Moonless nights has come to an end.

Had my eye on a big band of rain and cloud running right down the East coast last night – by some miracle it just kept clear of Hampshire.  So yet ANOTHER clear and Moonless night for imaging.

Decided to set the Sky 90 array up on a Carbon star in Gemini, SAO79474 or N Q Geminorum.  As luck would have it, there was also an asteroid 73 Klytia in the same FOV.

Images of the asteroid and Carbon star below.  The small bunches of tiny “stars” in the asteroid image are hot pixels as the asteroid data is “average” combined in order to keep the asteroid.  As this is dithered data there are no hot pixels in the Carbon star image as that has been SDMask combined.