How many stars can you see when you look in the region under the handle of The Plough/Big Dipper?  Chances are only one shows up – this one – Cor Caroli in the constellation Canes Venatici.  In this image North is to the right.  Image processed by Noel Carboni who expertly removed a rather nasty lens flare caused by Cor Caroli – and photons grabbed by Greg Parker at the New Forest Observatory.

Noel Carboni has just finished processing this wide-field deep-sky image from a few days back.  This is the Whale & Hockey stick region in Coma Berenices and you can also see “The Mice” lower far left.  Shows that I don’t have the best setup for galaxy work, so this time of the year is always a bit difficult for me.  Managed to salvage this one by balancing the galaxies with the bunch of bright stars at the bottom – but I can’t always play this trick.  The wide-field setup is really built for star fields and large nebulae, that season is due soon

Noel has just finished processing the recent Leo Trio data and added in some very old Hyperstar 1 data (taken on an H9C!) from way back.  Needless to say, Noel’s process is far better than my feeble effort and you can see it in all it’s glory here

Unexpectedly clear night last night so I managed to grab 3 and a half hours worth of 200 second subs on the M53 region with the Sky 90/M25C.  There’s a pile of faint fuzzies in the background of this average combined image.  Scarily they all disappeared with an SDMask combine – I may have to seriously rethink my pre-processing.

Managed to grab 4-hours of data last night on the Leo Trio region with the bright star Chertan (Theta Leonis) in the field of view.  This is a very quick and nasty process by yours truly – Noel will do a much better job.  One piece of good news – I managed to rid the optical train of a mess of dust bunnies which had accumulated.  Turned out they were on the face of the CCD chip itself and luckily I had some proprietary polymer lens cleaner to hand to remove the little bu***rs

I should mention that in all these recent Sky 90 images I am using the CCD in portrtait mode – so north is to the right in these landscape mode portrayed images.

I imaged this object last night and Noel Carboni processed it today.  Three and a half hours exposure time using 10-minute subs on the M105 region in Leo.  Apart from the 3 Messier objects, there are quite a lot of background galaxies to find as well.

Unbelievably it was clear last night – and no annoying Moon to contend with either!  But what to image?  I have the H-alpha filter in at the moment so I went for the faint supernova remnant in Cassiopeia – CTB1.  And it is faint!  However – I could actually see it on each of the half-hour subs which is more than I can say when I used straight one-shot colour (no H-alpha filter) a while ago.  On the minus side I think that I will still need about another 8-hours on this object to bring it up to New Forest Observatory quality

Noel has recently processed just about the only image I’ve taken since the beginning of November 2010 – astronomy-wise, this is the worst spell of weather we’ve had since I started imaging in the Winter of 2004!!  I was hoping that 2011 would bring a change in the wet, grey weather, not so far it seems :(  Is the mini-WASP array ever going to get used?

As you will know we had a rare beautifully clear Moonless night last night – time for some serious imaging!  I had planned to grab IC1831, a ball of stars very close to the Heart nebula, quite some while back.  10-minute subs and 6 hours total exposure time – what more do you want?  Well – camera problems (I haven’t got a clue what’s wrong with it yet, but it behaves as if there’s water vapour in the cell – but there isn’t – and it’s intermittent as well!) meant that I only got 18 subs (3-hours) out of the 36 that were useful – incredibly frustrating.  Also – I’m not that overwhelmed by IC1831 itself.  If you look this up on “The Sky 6″ you see this incredible ball of stars just sitting off the Heart nebula.  Well I guess the ball of stars is there – but it is less impressive than some of the deep images I’ve taken in the Milky Way region of Cassiopeia (near CTB1).  So a mixed night of highs, lows and general indifference – not good for 6 hours of quality imaging time

Well – it’s been a very long wait for a clear sky – but tonight in Brockenhurst I’ve struck lucky with the weather.  Absolutely freezing outside, but crystal clear dark (Moonless) sky outside and managed to get started imaging at 5:45 p.m. – very happy   I’m using “the Sky 6″ to point the C11 and it seems to work pretty well.  Object for tonight – a compact ball of stars lying very close to the Heart nebula labelled IC1831.  10-minute subs at f#3.5 and I’ll keep going until the object moves out of view or it clouds/fogs over.  It’s been a long wait, but at least it’s been a fine night to kick off again with the imaging.