So what’s the excuse for such a grubby image then? Half the sky (towards the East) was clear at 6:00 p.m. but half the sky running north to south and covering the whole of the West was black and overcast. M82 was in the clear bit 🙂 🙂 🙂  Fired up the Hyperstar, did the 2 star align, autofocused on the second star and slewed to M82 – all going well so far. Took a single 30-second sub to check the framing (that’s the image above) – great – M82 is dead centre. Now just need to get a guide star, get autoguiding, and get a load of subs. Autoguide setup playing up – yep, completely clouded out in those 10-15 minutes 🙁 🙁 🙁  So all I got was this 30-second setting up sub. But at least you can see the damn thing.

As it has been non-stop rain for days on end now, I have resorted to taking a look at old data.

Just put together all the datasets I could find of the Cygnus Wall region taken with the Hyperstar III and the M25C one shot colour camera.

You can see the result here:

The Canon 200mm prime lens and the Canon 5D MkII DSLR were put to good use a few days back grabbing a massive (10 x 6.8 degree) wide-field around the Cocoon nebula in Cygnus.  Using ISO 400 and f#4.5 with an IDAS filter I captured 21 x 4-minute subs with the DSLR and guided using the SX guide camera on a small refractor – all piggy-backed on the C11 which is now groaning under all the added weight.  Further Hyperstar III data of the Cocoon region alone was added to the DSLR template by Noel Carboni who created the final composite using Photoshop and his Astronomy Action Tools.  The Hyperstar III data set was taken a couple of years ago and comprises a 3-frame mosaic with each frame being around 3-4 hours total exposure time using 10-minute sub-exposures.

This combination of using the DSLR to create the wide-field star-field template, and then filling in the nebulosity and faint stuff with either the Hyperstar III or the mini-WASP looks like a winning combination.  The only problem is that the images only look impressive when printed out BIG – all the detail gets lost in A4 size or smaller.

This is a composite image combining the recent 8 x 20-minute subs from the Hyperstar III with earlier Sky 90/M25C which incorporated H-alpha and OIII narrowband data.

Taken with the HSIII on 04/07/2013 this is an S-type star, SAO 69360 in Cygnus.

There was a fair bit of thin high cloud wandering over last night (as it turned out it didn’t get in the way of Cygnus) and so I only set up the Hyperstar III and didn’t run the mini-WASP array.  I hadn’t looked at the framing of this one carefully and centred SAO 69116 in the centre of the HSIII field of view – forgetting that I had the chip in portrait mode rather than landscape mode.  Ooops – that meant that I only just got the edge of the Tulip nebula in the frame 🙁  Never mind, I’ll take the second frame another time.

So I’m spending a couple of hours imaging in Cygnus with both the mini-WASP array and the Hyperstar III 🙂

For the second test of the newly aligned M25C camera on the Hyperstar III I chose the Stephenson 1 region of Lyra.  Although I didn’t have the optics spot-on they were pretty close and I’m quite pleased with the resulting image.  When I spend a little more time getting the collimation just right we’ll be back to the earlier high-quality Hyperstar III imagery we’re used to seeing 🙂

Recently imaged M57 as a test-shot for the recently flattened M25C chip.  This is 14 x 5-minute subs with a blazing nearly full Moon overhead.  Looks pretty reasonable considering 🙂

The Hyperstar III is so fast that all other amateur imaging systems are extremely slow and have very disappointing performance in comparison – and that includes the mini-WASP array as currently configured.