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

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.

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

Today it was brought home to me just how dangerous it is to work on your own in this imaging business.  Tom How is a local guy and an imaging expert, and we only recently realised that we hadn’t met up for (too many!) years.  So Tom popped over to Brockenhurst this morning to see what I had been up to in the intervening years.  Tom also educated me about darks, bias frames and flats, something he has spent a lot of time on getting properly sorted out on his system.  It was when he showed me the bias frame from my M25C that he immediately knew that something was wrong with the camera – there was a large top-to-bottom gradient.  As I’ve never looked at a bias frame before it meant nothing to me.  However – it did kick me into action – and the long and the short of it is that (after mailing Terry Platt) it looks like the Peltier cooler is open circuit.  I have no idea how long the CCD hasn’t been cooled, but I suspect it goes back to when the power supply gave up the ghost a couple of years ago!!  Blimey – Noel and I have been turning out some pretty nice images without a cooled CCD.  We were getting a bit cheesed off with the hot pixels mind you – and I was very surprised (after having used the H9C for a few years) that I couldn’t do a decent job on CTB1, the supernova remnant in Cassiopeia.  Now we know why!!  So it is a trip up to Starlight Xpress ASAP for some surgery on the M25C and hopefully we’ll see a big leap in image quality brought about by some decent chip cooling!!  If Tom hadn’t popped over and pushed me along to see about bias frames and the like I would have carried on in ignorance.  This is the risk you run if you work on your own in this technologically demanding hobby

Last night I managed to grab the frame to the right of the Cocoon nebula – whilst at the same time getting some ultra-wide-fields of the Perseids using the Canon 5D MkII, 15mm fish-eye lens and AstroTrac.  Anyway – I quickly bolted the Cocoon right hand frame on and what do I find?  In order to get all the dark nebulosity in the region I also need the two frames off the top and bottom as well!!  Talk about a go-deeper job.  Well at least we all know what this summer’s mega-project will be.

Recent clear night a few days back so I grabbed some more Hyperstar III data on the Cocoon and its associated dark nebulosity and added it to some data taken last year.  I will try and get another frame off to the right of this one just to see if there’s anything there – if not it should still give us some nice Milky Way stars

In a pathetic attempt at trying to keep imaging with nights that are like a sunrise, here is a globular cluster in the Milky Way – M56 in the constellation Lyra.  I really like globulars with a Milky Way background – and fortunately there are a few of these.  What I didn’t know was that you could see galaxies through the Milky Way – there are 2 small ones top-left, there’s also a planetary nebula in there (towards the middle) as well.

Last night I successfully collimated the modified Hyperstar III lens assembly and took a “first light” image with the new setup.  Full Moon (or close to) low down on the southern horizon, and a sky that doesn’t really get dark.  Imaged from midnight until 1:00 a.m. once I had collimated the system using CCDInspector (this is a great program!).  To remind you – the Hyperstar III modification was to take the whole lens assembly apart, then blacken all the lens edges using a matt black paint, and then to flock the internal lens spacer tube.  First time I re-assembled the Hyperstar I managed to put the lenses back the wrong way round (what a twit!) – but thankfully Dean of Starizona came to the rescue YET AGAIN and second time around I got it right.  So – lenses back in correctly, wires all fixed to the connector rods at 90 degrees to one another – final job, get the collimation sorted.  Took me just over an hour to sort this out using CCDInspector – and the result? – errors of -0.0 in x and -0.1 in y – the best I’ve EVER seen to date using the Hyperstar III, so I now have a highly-collimated system to play with  Having completed the collimation I set up on the “Wall” region of NGC7000 for a quick practical test of the optics.  Noel dropped everything and kindly processed this one in ultra double-quick time.  WOW!!  Those stars are nice and round across the whole FOV and the result is about the best I’ve seen in using the Hyperstar III for over a year – great!  You can now expect a large quality-jump in the images coming out from the New Forest Observatory from today onwards.

I have just half-completed a very scary summer project!  The Hyperstar III lens assembly is a fantastic technological achievement which turns an ultra-slow f#10 Schmidt-Cassegrain into an ultra-fast f#2 Schmidt-Camera.  There is a slight problem though with all that glass in the Hyperstar – thick lenses – and the edges of the lenses are frosted, not blackened.  This means that if you wish to image a bright constellation star, you will unfortunately get some lens flaring.  For non-bright constellation stars I rarely get any problem.

So – just as I did with the Hyperstar I, I took the whole lens assembly apart (scary) and then painted the edges of the lenses matt black (VERY scary!) they are now all sitting on my desk in the sunshine for the paint to thoroughly dry off.  I use Revell colour Black Matt 9 – this is the paint used on Airfix kits.  It is probably not the best paint to use – there is a proprietary paint you can get from the States that is made especially to paint the edges of lenses.

I will keep you informed of how things progress (or not) when I rebuild the Hyperstar III and take my first image with the modified lenses.  Keep everything crossed for me

Noel Carboni is currently assembling the NFO Spring mega project of 2010.

This is a massive mosaic of the Virgo/Coma galaxy cluster region centred on the famous Markarian Chain of galaxies.  This mosaic is created from a number of frames taken with both the Sky 90 and Hyperstar III telescopes both using the SXVF-M25C one-shot colour camera, and the image reveals many hundreds of galaxies.

I shall be creating just a very few HUGE prints measuring some 5 feet in height and 6-7 feet in length which will be available for purchase.  These will be extremely expensive to acquire (sorry), but they are totally unique high-resolution prints specifically designed for the corporate environment and with an extremely limited print run of just 25 prints!

Stay tuned to the New Forest Observatory blog to keep up to date with this, our most ambitious project to-date.  If you would like to pre-order your massive “Galaxy Wall” print for your institution then please mail sales@newforestobservatory.com for more information – but please be quick, with only 25 prints in total, they will soon be snapped up!