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.

I took a look at the star map to see if there were any nicely coloured pairs of stars in close proximity to one another.  The “super Albireo” pair of Algol and Rho Persei stood out like a sore thumb, so last night (as it was apparently clear) I had a go at imaging this area.  Well – it wasn’t so clear after all, and what I thought was going to be a brilliant dataset of 55 4-minute subs got whittled right down to just 27-subs due to cloud – hence the well-known saying don’t count your subs ………..

Anyway, some poor processing on 108-minutes of data by yours truly (Noel is taking a well-earned break out in the wilds) gives the result below.  There’s a few galaxies in this one, several of them very close to Algol!

See a bigger version on my Flickr site

Thought I would begin a video diary on the mini-WASP array project at this time even before the hole has been dug in the ground for the obligatory concrete block.  As we are all aware – any new observatory project begins with a hole in the ground that we subsequently fill with a cubic yard of concrete.  The short video (shot on the mega Sony NEX-VG10E handycam) shows the position the new observatory will occupy, to the left of the original 7-foot fibreglass dome, creating a Keck II landscape in the garden.  Next steps in the project will be digging the hole (5 foot deep, 1 foot above ground level and 2-foot by 2-foot cross-section) – filling the hole with concrete and setting in the all-Aluminium pier, and finally building the octagonal wooden decking around the central concrete block which will then support the new dome.  I expect this first phase of the project to start around March-April 2011.  And yes – the Paramount has now been sitting unused in my dining-room for almosr a year – unforgiveable

Another clear Moonless sky tonight so I’m taking a second data set of the Soul nebula.  I did intend imaging the comet – but as it wasn’t clearly visible through the finder scope I have decided not to bother with it.

Nice clear Moonless night last night – up until midnight that is when in rolled the high cloud and imaging ended.  Got just over 3 hours on the Soul nebula IC1848 in Cassiopeia.  Looking at the data I probably need another 4 hours or so on this one for a quality image – that’s the Sky 90 lack of speed for you