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.

It was while putting together my top 10 that I realised there had been a serious omission!  I have not put up the definitive Horsehead and Belt region of Orion on the NFO site, although it had appeared way back in January 2009 as a 2-page spread article in Astronomy Now magazine.  This is a massive 2-framer taken with the Sky 90 and SXVF-M25C.  Not only that, each frame comprises, RGB, H-alpha and H-beta data as well.  Many, many hours of data acquisition (around 40!) and many, many hours of Noel’s processing time (at least another 40!) bring you ……………

Enjoy!!!

Here is the second marathon processing session by Noel.  This time it’s the Belt region of Orion. Read the rest of this entry »

Noel has been very busy processing recently and the first to come back across the pond was this composite image of the North America and Pelican nebulae in Cygnus. Read the rest of this entry »

More great news!!  Today we got the Jellyfish nebula (IC443) and its companion IC444 published as an Earth Science Picture of the Day.  Read the rest of this entry »

Taken over several years this image is a composite of Hyperstar I, Sky 90 and Hyperstar III data. Read the rest of this entry »