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.

Managed to get some imaging in 2 nights ago (Jan 18th 2018) and got 30 x 10-minute subs on 8 Flora, middle of run at 21:32.

You can see to the right and a little bit down from Flora there is another reasonably bright asteroid.  Any ideas what this is?  It does not show up on my version of the Sky 6.

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.

One way of taking a high resolution zoom-in zoom-out of a deep-space image is to take the region concerned at 2 different focal lengths, or to take a single frame and then a mosaic of frames of the region. This image showing the Running Man and the whole of the central part of the Orion nebula uses a combination of both techniques. The Running Man alone is a Hyperstar image taken at 550mm focal length, and the central Orion nebula image is a Sky 90 4-frame mosaic taken at a focal length of 450mm. Enjoy 🙂

I have very deep data of M13 and for the first time today I took a good look at the image to see if I could find “The Propeller”.

And there it was!!