Peter Rusling has also used one of the Amazon supplied light panels for taking flats.  He says:

“I’ve bought one of these excellent panels and thought I’d share that the light USB L4S version will mount safely on a £15 articulated TV arm in an obsy using Velcro. This allows me to position it up against either of my scopes and has the added bonus of providing an observatory light (albeit white) when stowed against the wall.”

A picture of Peter’s setup is shown below.

It was a spectacular display of the Perseids last night – and unbelievably the persistent thin high cloud disappeared shortly after 11 p.m. leaving completely clear skies – and after 12:30 a.m. they were Moonless skies as well!  Out of 220 images taken with the Canon 5D MkII and Canon 15mm fisheye lens, 27 images had meteors – and the colourful Perseid below was the best image of the evening.  Possibly the best Perseid evening I have ever witnessed.

Having swapped out the Master Computer and mucked around a bit with Sky 90(1) I had some clear sky last night to take some test shots to see what needs fine tuning.  This image is just 12 x 5-minute subs with the array.  I now know that I need to very slightly flatten the Sky 90(1) chip and I need to re-align Sky 90(2) and Sky 90(3) to Sky 90(1).  Then the Sky 90 array will be ready for the new season.  The Canon 200mm DSLR array is of course fine and needs no attention!!  I wish now that I had built the whole array out of Canon 200mm lenses – live and learn 🙂

From 05/08/2016 Canon 15mm fisheye lens and Canon 5D MkII DSLR.

I have recently finished the Second Edition of the Springer publication “Making Beautiful Deep-Sky Images” and it has been sent off to them to make bookworthy.  Springer then sends me back the draft (with all the page numbers) and I then have the final (mind-destroying) job of putting the Index together.  You will see the new 2nd Edition in the shops next year (I’ll let you know when) and if you have the 1st Edition, there’s enough new stuff in the 2nd Edition (including completely new chapters, and completely re-written old chapters) to warrant raiding your wallets for a second time.  The biggest change you will see on the front cover is the removal of the sub-title “Astrophotography with Affordable Equipment and Software” – with a chapter dedicated to the New Forest Observatory mini-WASP Array – some of the equipment is now anything but affordable.

Also available on YouTube

I spent 7 hours behind a monitor yesterday downloading SDO data of the Mercury transit every 15-minutes.

I put all the SDO data together to give this very short animation.

Over the New Forest Observatories this evening:

Could I please re-iterate:  None of my images are available “free of charge”.  Please take a moment to look at the “Image Agency and Copyright Notice” section.

Thank you.