I put together a little montage of the 3 brightest stars for those living in Northern latitudes.

You can see the image here.

Sirius, Arcturus and Vega to similar scales and total exposure times, so this is relatively how they look to one another in the night sky.

This month’s image is a wide-field taken using the amazing Canon EF200 f#2.8 prime lens and a Canon 5D MkII DSLR.  Piggy-back mounted on the C11 I took 10 x 5-minute subs at ISO 400 and f#4 with an IDAS filter attached to the EF200.  As expected the Heart and Soul nebulae didn’t come out too well with the un-modified 5D MkII, but I am very pleased indeed with the nice round stars from corner to corner over a 10 x 6.8 degree field of view – something well beyond the capabilities of my refractors.  Looks like I will be using this rig for star fields and reasonably high resolution constellation shots.

Clear Moonless night last night and I imaged a Carbon star near Caph in Cassiopeia.  Mini-WASP array, all 3 cameras, 19 subs at 4-minutes per sub.

Couldn’t believe when I loaded up this image that I’d done it last month  Need to get a grip!

Ended up in getting 15 subs per camera at 10-minutes per sub on the Bubble nebula region in Cepheus last night.  Needs about the same amount of data again to bring out the faint stuff, or maybe some H-alpha narrowband data using the Sky 90.  Trouble is, clear Moonless nights are in very short supply and there’s so much out there to capture

And I’m imaging M52, the bubble nebula, NGC 7538 and NGC 7510 with a single mini-WASP frame.

I see the Image of the Month didn’t pop up a couple of days back.  Either I didn’t do one or it’s lost in cyberspace.  Never mind, here’s one a couple of days late.  This is the recent M11 in the Scutum star cloud image taken a couple of months back using the mini-WASP array.  This is rapidly becoming my favourite image, mainly due to all those stars

Flitting through a planetarium program I stumbled upon a nice bright Carbon star in Corona Borealis.  Designated SAO 84015 at magnitude 6 this should look really great!  So a couple of nights ago I fired up the mini-WASP to grab this one, 5-minute subs, all 3 cameras.  First sub came down and – nothing.  No bright star near the centre of the field of view at all.  Strange.  Never mind, I just left the mini-WASP running as I have done this sort of thing before where I’ve been a little off in pointing the scope.  Next day I process the data – and – still nothing.  Open up the planetarium program and compare with my image – I find SAO 84015 on my image and it is sitting there at about magnitude 14??  So now we start to go deeper.

A bit more investigating shows that SAO 84015 is much more well known as R Coronae Borealis (even I have heard of that before) which shows odd “inverse nova” behaviour.  I knew that it often dimmed from mag 6 to mag 14 but after a few weeks or at most months at minimum it would slowly climb back up to mag 6 again.  Could I have been plain unlucky and caught it at its minimum?  Start digging again.

Looks like R Coronae Borealis took a dive around 2006 – surely it hasn’t been at minimum all this time has it?  It has never shown that behaviour before.  Contacted a few star experts and – yes – that’s exactly what’s happened.  R Coronae Borealis took a dive all those years ago and is still languishing down at mag 12 – 14 with no immediate signs of recovery, how weird.

So now I’m playing a waiting game, waiting to see if and when R Coronae Borealis once again blazes away at mag 6.  If I can get another image with the star at maximum this will make a really interesting image pair – what a huge contrast in star brightness!!

For this DSS2 image of the Tulip nebula region in Cygnus I just kept adding frames until the computer gave up

Another object bagged by the mini-WASP array during the recent period of clear Moonless nights.  This time it is the Globular Cluster M10 in the constellation Ophiucus.  7 x 10-minute sub-exposures on all 3 cameras.

Lovely clear night again last night, but with a blazing Moon in the south it meant imaging towards the north.  Decided on a cluster rich region close to Ruchbah in Cassiopeia as the target.  Mini-WASP array, all 3 cameras firing, 20 subs at 5 minutes per sub on each camera.  Looks like cloud tonight, so I’m glad I made the effort to get some imaging done last night.