I recently gave a talk in Lymington on photography in general (not just the deep-sky stuff).  A number of people asked about purchasing images – and the price.  Go to “Image Gallery” click on “owning” or “purchasing” and you will see the sizes available and the prices for astronomical prints.  For examples of photomicrography, macro or high-speed flash work go to the Scientific Artist web page and choose your image – pricing for prints is the same (size for size) as astronomical prints.

View to my south – tree lit up by the street lights.  Why Aldebaran is blue but Betelgeuse is the correct colour I have no idea.

I just found some old unprocessed Hyperstar III data from 17th April 2010 and got on and processed it this afternoon   This is the Markarian Chain of galaxies in Virgo, and everything that is not obviously a star is a galaxy.  Put in B&W again so you can have fun counting all the “faint fuzzies” in this one – I can tell you there are a lot!  Went pretty deep here as it was the Hyperstar III at f#2 and there are 34 sub-exposures using 5-minute exposures per sub – just 10-minutes short of 3-hours of total exposure time on this one.  Also found on the HDD another 7 Hyperstar III frames making up a mega-mosaic of this whole galaxy-rich region – all unprocessed data.  I think you can guess what I’ll be working on for the next week or so

There is a bright Moon overhead and tons of thin high cloud – no good for imaging but perfect for getting the Hyperstar tuned up again   Managed to focus train and collimate the Hyperstar to better than ever before in under an hour – now that is a record!  Perfect stars corner to corner, superb collimation, and I’m now doing a spot of ultra-fast f#2 imaging (with dither) just to fine check the system and give the stars a good analysis tomorrow.  The image won’t be top rate (due to the Moon) but at least I’ll be all ready for the next clear Moonless night.  Hyperstar rools.  And I now have a sticky note on the rig to the effect that the Hyperstar does not come off again – ever

Took this image with the Canon 5D MkII around 7:20 p.m. on Monday 2nd January 2012.  Here we have a very nice lunar halo and close to the Moon at around 7 O’clock we  have Jupiter too.  But there’s a lot more!  Just outside the halo at 10:30 there are the Pleiades and a little further out again at 9:30 there is Aldebaran and the Pleiades.  Over to the far left (East) rising above the trees is the familiar Winter constellation Orion.  Bottom left you can see the North dome, and a little further to the right at the bottom you can just make out the top of the South dome.  Pretty busy image

Happy New Year to you all

My log book confirms that 2011 was the worst year, weather-wise, for imaging since I started this lark.  Not too surprising I guess with the groundbreaking mini-WASP array being this year’s mega-project.  I hope the weather Gods are now satisfied that they have effectively ruined the mini-WASP’s arrival in this world and will now leave off to give us a half-decent 2012.  Here’s hoping for clear dark skies, and plenty of them for 2012.

As it has not been imaging weather recently I have had a lot of time to both look over old images in more detail and to process a few old images that never got looked at in the first place.  Whilst looking at some old data which I thought was worthless (it was Hyperstar III/M25C data taken in the wrong region) I found something very interesting!  The image should have been NGC1333 in Perseus, but the finder scope hadn’t been put back into its proper place after doing a bit of DSLR piggy-back photography, so I didn’t get NGC1333.  However, I was still in Perseus, and I got 48 subs at 6-minutes per sub of a fairly uninteresting Perseus star field under almost perfect imaging conditions.  I remember being extremely annoyed at the time that I had wasted nearly 5-hours of great imaging time imaging in the wrong place – but now looking at the image again I can see it wasn’t such a waste of time.  I am clearly picking up the swathes of dust in the region, something that I have only recently been aware of due to Rogelio’s superb work.  WOW – that is a bit impressive from street light polluted Brockenhurst, and it brought back home to me the extreme photon grabbing power of the Hyperstar III on the C11 – something the mini-WASP array simply cannot match (even though it has 4x the field of view of the Hyperstar/C11).  I took the Hyperstar III off a couple of months back and set up to do f#10 imaging which was certainly challenging and great fun.  BUT – I simply had not appreciated that the Hyperstar III wasn’t redundant with the commissioning of the mini-WASP – on the contrary, it might be very useful to have the Hyperstar also contribute data to that acquired by the mini-WASP, especially for the really faint stuff!!  So what’s the revelation?  Obviously the Hyperstar III is going straight back onto the C11 first thing tomorrow – and this time it is staying on – for good   O.K. so I get a bit frustrated when I fire up for an evening’s imaging and find that the collimation has shifted (because the mirror has shifted) – but I think that is a frustration I am simply going to have to deal with – the Hyperstar III/C11 is simply far too powerful an imaging setup not to have there ready to image at a moment’s notice.  The Hyperstar is back yet again

I saw the “hits” counter was approaching the 250,000 mark a couple of days ago – and there, this morning it had just surpassed the magic quarter of a million

Please keep regularly visiting the New Forest Observatory site – with the commissioning of the mini-WASP array, 2012 promises to be an exceptional year for deep-sky imaging.

Opened up the pinhole camera today (the day before the Winter Solstice) after another 6-month exposure imaging the Sun crossing my southern horizon.  This time I used a FLAT film in the camera (which was an old tea caddy) rather than the usual beer can pinhole camera which gives a more distorted image as the film is curled around the inside of a beer can.  The straight line edge to the left is the roof of the house over the road.  You can see plenty of trees along the sky line – and you might just be able see two light dome-shaped structures which are the New Forest observatories.  Opened up the camera on 18th June 2011 3 days before the Summer Solstice.

Just a reminder that the New Forest Observatory site now only shows astronomical images and all those other images that I used to post here such as macros, micros, high-speed flash and mathematical objects, can now be found on my Scientific Artist site.