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

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!

This is the central frame of a large mosaic being constructed of the galaxy-rich region at the Virgo/Coma border – hot off the press from Noel Carboni.  We see Markarian Chain central and at the bottom M87 in this Hyperstar III image.  This is just one of seven (yes 7!) Hyperstar III frames taken in this general area during April – I am surprised we had so many clear nights in the one month.  The mega-mosaic will also incorporate 3 frames taken 2 years ago with the Sky 90/M25C system with its 3.33 x 2.22 degree field of view per frame.  I will cover the region up to (Northwards) M100 and its surroundings, and Southwards to well below M87 where plenty more small galaxies are to be found.  I’m not sure what the final size of the mosaic will be, but I estimate it somewhere in the region of 6 degrees by 4 degrees – high-resolution and good depth :)  Another Parker-Carboni mega-imaging-project in the same league as the Veil nebula, the Andromeda galaxy, and of course the Belt and Horsehead region of Orion.

After 3 weeks of brisk sales of the “Belt of Orion” things have settled down again so it’s time to introduce the second “Print of the Month” offer from the New Forest Observatory.

This Month’s full colour A3 print using HP Glossy 250g/m2 Advanced Photo Paper and the 6-colour HP Designjet 130 printer is Comet Lulin in the constellation Leo taken on February 28th 2009.  The print will be signed and dated and will come in a protective polypropylene punched pouch.  Your print will then be packed in a robust cardboard poster packaging tube for shipping.  The Special Offer price for the Comet Lulin print is still only £25 which includes postage and packing!  This offer is only open to U.K. residents.

If you would like to order your April 2010 “Print of the Month” of Comet Lulin – please e-mail sales@newforestobservatory.com to arrange your delivery.

On a fairly regular basis (but probably NOT monthly) I shall be offering a “Print of the Month” at a significantly reduced price.  This will be an A3 full colour, full-resolution print using HP Glossy 250g/m2 Advanced Photo Paper and the 6-colour HP designjet 130.  Each print will be signed and dated and will come in a protective polypropylene punched pouch.  Prints will then be packed in a robust cardboard poster packaging tube for shipping.  The Special Offer price is just £25 which includes postage and packing!!  This offer is only open to U.K. residents.

This Month’s “Print of the Month” is the 2-frame Sky 90/SXVF-M25C image of the Horsehead nebula and Belt of Orion region.

Please note that as this image is almost “square” there will be a largish white border on the long side of the paper, i.e. the image will take the maximum width of the A3 sheet, and this will also be the “length” of the image as well.

If you would like to order your March 2010 “Print of the Month” of the Horsehead nebula and Belt of Orion region – please e-mail sales@newforestobservatory.com to arrange your delivery.

Another clear night last night – and with the success of capturing a couple of asteroids the night before (1079 Mimosa and 2833 Radishchev I think, courtesy the Sky 6) – I went back to M44 and asteroid central once again.  This time I went for 10-minute subs with the Hyperstar III (equivalent to 1-hour subs with the Sky 90) in order to go that bit deeper and see if I could pull out some more asteroids.  A total of 20 subs later, I’ve yet to process the data but will get back later today with the results of this exercise.

Noel has just added some more data I recently took of the Iris nebula to our original image.  Second data set added 15 x 15-minute subs to the original 3 hours and 45 minutes worth of 200 second subs – so this one goes nice and deep as can be seen by the dust clouds.

Noel Carboni has just re-processed an earlier image of ours – IC405 & IC410, the Flaming Star nebula and companion in the constellation Auriga.  Auriga is sitting overhead right now during our crisp winter evenings and it  is in a perfect position for imaging the many clusters & nebulae that lie within.  This image features in our Springer publication “Star Vistas” published Spring 2009.

Noel Carboni has been putting a considerable amount of effort into developing a new star spike plugin for Photoshop.  He has been trying it out on a few of our images as a test and this is the result of working on the deep-sky image of Procyon.

Artificial star spikes are either something you like, or something you pretty much dislike – personally I think they add to an image about 90% of the time with only very few images not benefitting from adding spikes.