Nice clear night last night and managed to get 3-hours worth of 4-minute subs on M44 with the Hyperstar III.  Bagged a couple of asteroids (I think M44 is asteroid central as it sits just about on top of the ecliptic) – will let you know which asteroids they are if any one on the Forums identifies them (I can’t be bothered looking these things up).

Pulled up EPOD (Earth Science Picture of the Day) a couple of minutes ago and unexpectedly found the NFO image of NGC1333 looking back at me.  It really is a stunning region of space and the eerie-looking dust clouds gives the image a really sinister appearance.  Thank you Jim for putting this one up today – I think it is one of our very best so far.

Lovely clear night last night, and perfect for trying to capture the asteroid Vesta now leaving the head of Leo.  46 subs at 200-seconds per sub with the C11 and Hyperstar III – image captured and processed by Greg Parker at the New Forest Observatory.  The brightest star to the left of the image is Algieba in the head of Leo.

If it stays clear for long enough, and I’m imaging in the right place – then tomorrow sometime I should be posting up an image of the asteroid Vesta which is passing the star Algieba in the constellation Leo right now.  Apparently it is only moving about 1 arcminute every couple of hours so I will need to try and get at least 4-hours on this one if possible.  I started at 9:50 p.m. and I’ll go on for as long as possible

Several clear nights in a row recently and I concentrated on just one beautiful region – IC2169 and surroundings in Monoceros.  This reflection nebula lies just to the right of the cone nebula, in fact the red emission nebulosity over to the left is part of the cone nebula complex.  Towards the lower left is a beautiful golden open cluster – OCL494 or Trumpler 5.  9 hours in total using 4-minute subs and processed by Noel in Florida.

Clearly another landmark image for Star Vistas II

Another 4 hours of data was acquired on this object and Noel put the whole thing together which now totals some 9 hours of imaging time.  Beautiful reflection nebula NGC1333 and the accompanying dust clouds lie in the constellation Perseus.  This is one of the “busiest” regions I have ever imaged

Noel recently processed the Caldwell 10 dataset and managed to pull out that faint red cluster (IC116) over at the top left.  There are in fact a total of 7 (yes – seven) open clusters in this frame.

Another recent capture from the New Forest Observatory processed by Noel Carboni (I don’t “do” globulars   Here is a nice wide field view of globular cluster M15 in the constellation Pegasus caught using the Hyperstar III and SXVF-M25C one-shot colour camera.  The C11/Hyperstar III/SXVF-M25C is a truly superb combination for fast capture of clusters and star fields – a great dataset can be obtained in a single (4-hour) evening’s imaging.

Managed to get some good data on this open cluster in Cassiopeia – and please sit down – actually processed this one myself   A very nice region in Cassiopeia with two other open clusters also in the field of view.  Now we come to the sadder bit – I’ve definitely reached THAT age – I hadn’t realised I’d already captured this region (and a lot more) in an old Sky 90 image I called “5 clusters and a nebula” which featured Ruchbah in the bottom right hand corner.  Not too good really as I can’t waste a good evening’s imaging by (accidentally) going over old objects.  Never mind – I’ll take a bit more care next time and check through the old datasets to see that this doesn’t happen again.

This data was collected on January 8th 2010 (I have not imaged since then due to bad weather) and I went for this region not to get the Crab nebula (which I knew would be very small in the field of view) but to try and capture an asteroid or 3.  M1 lies very close to the ecliptic, and whenever I have previously imaged objects close to the ecliptic I have always bagged a few asteroids too, usually some pretty bright ones.  Clearly as I had gone out with the intention of getting an asteroid – there were none visible in this data!  So all we have is a lonely looking Crab Nebula (a supernova remnant).  Image recently processed by Noel Carboni using averaged data (rather than SDmask stacked data).