A number of people have asked me how many stars appear in the Cocoon nebula 3-frame mosaic.  I use a program called Registar to link separate frames together so I can see how they all fit – and Registar will also do a “star count” for the stars in the image (I don’t think it is accurate to the level of a star )  Anyway – Registar says there are 68,200 in this image – always turns out to be a LOT less than you would guess.

As it continues to pour with rain here in the New Forest – thoughts go back to the hot, dry days at the Starmus Festival in Tenerife June this year

Here are a few pictures from the day – I still can’t believe how lucky we were with the weather.  Had a few drops of rain first thing in the morning just to put the scarers on us – then cleared up beautifully for the rest of the day

As summer definitely starts retreating and autumn approaches a bit too rapidly – thoughts go back to a warmer time at the Starmus Festival on Tenerife – June 2011.  This is the sumptuous Abama Hotel where most of the Festival was held – it really was like something out of Star Wars springing out in the middle of a desert landscape like a fairy-tale oasis – a totally remarkable place.

This pair of open clusters has a Milky Way backdrop and they are surrounded by faint emission nebulosity.  They can be found in the constellation Cygnus lying just underneath the Crescent nebula region.  Image taken 19th August 2009 using the Hyperstar III – 22 sub-exposures at 5-minutes per sub (equivalent to 30-minute subs on the Sky 90).

I have no idea why I took this image of a galaxy group in Bootes on January 29th 2011.  I also have no record of it in the logbook.  I ran an astrometry check on it to find where it was – the bright star near the middle is magnitude 4.80.  Apparently this is 19 sub-exposures at 10-minutes per sub, so for some reason I spent 3 hours of good imaging time on this one – if only I could remember why

A very lively party at Sir Patrick’s last night, all the usual suspects present.  This was a double celebration of the 700th Sky at Night, and Sir Patrick’s birthday (which was the day before).  Sir Patrick had supposedly invited 70 people – I think there were at least 270 in the Marquee.

No photos of this event from me I’m afraid as some self-appointed bunch of knob-heads who were helpfully blocking the way in for Patrick’s guests made it clear that “the organisers” wanted no photographs to be taken (and no autographs to be asked for either)!  Who “these organisers” were I have no idea (and frankly I couldn’t care less) but I’m pretty sure that if Sir Patrick knew that his party had been hijacked in this way he would not have been too happy.

Other than that, great to see Sir Patrick again and looking forward to seeing the 700th edition of the Sky at Night this evening.

For some reason an incident that happened when I was 19 years old entered my mind twice today (early signs maybe?).  Perhaps this account will be of some use to somebody out there, you never know,  it might even save a life

I left school at 19 (one year late as I spent 2 years in New Zealand which effectively cost me a year’s education) and joined the U.K.A.E.A. Harwell – yes the radiation place – as an Assistant Scientific Officer.  Now the first six months were spent taking the world-famous Harwell training course which I must admit held me in good stead for the whole of my working life, but that is by the by.  So for six months I worked at Harwell before going to the Culham Laboratory for Fusion Research to work on CO2 lasers.  In my first few weeks I noticed something VERY VERY scary, there were LOTS of people working there with duff legs!  Lots of the workers were hobbling about with some leg (or foot) problem.  Well I wasn’t stupid – I had 3 A-levels – this could only be one thing – RADIATION POISONING!!  So, panic stricken at the sudden realisation at what was going on (I’ve always been a bit of a hypochondriac as well as a Conspiracy Theorist) I ran to the Training Officer during the lunch break – he could see I was pretty upset about something, and the conversation went something like this.

Training Officer – “O.K. Greg, so what is the problem?”

Newbie A.S.O. – When I look around this place, I see there’s tons of people walking around with duff legs and the like.  What’s going on here?  Has there been a radiation leak?  Am I in any danger here?

Training Officer – tears of laughter rolling down his face (I didn’t think it was particularly funny at the time) – “No Greg, there has not been any radiation leak, and you are not in any danger from radiation.  What you have noticed is that as part of the Scientific Civil Service we are actually doing what other large organisations like ours are meant to do, and don’t - we are taking on our full compliment of disabled people.”

Newbie A.S.O. – “Ahh”.  Goes back to lunch.

So the moral of the story is this, sometimes, even when the answer seems completely obvious to you - it may not be what you think it is

I connected up the Paramount ME to its 48V power supply which in turn goes to a 1000W uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in my attempt to protect the delicate Paramount motor boards and electronics from anything nasty coming down the mains (and believe me – here in 3rd world Brockehurst we often get nasty things coming down the mains).  I have my little Libretto sub-notebook running The Sky software and initially connected it to the Paramount via the Paramount’s serial port (I had to use a USB to serial port converter from the Libretto as modern laptops don’t know what serial or parallel ports are).  It didn’t run at first as I had to go into the hardware and see which COM port it had allocated to talk to the Paramount – for some unknown reason it had chosen COM 5 (???)  Once I had changed the settings in The Sky to COM 5 and hit “connect” the little Libretto started talking to the Paramount and the Paramount started talking back.  First thing it said was that the Paramount hadn’t been homed and did I want to do that.  Confirmed that I did and the mount burst into life (for the first time) and it slewed to the (wrong) home position as I haven’t synched the mount yet.  However, as the mount now thinks it has been homed it will let the joystick work – so I took this short video clip of the Paramount being controlled by the off-camera joystick

I don’t want to talk to the Paramount through the serial port however, I want to go direct through the USB port.  This required putting the software Bisque DVD in again and loading up the USB drivers for the MKS4000 Paramount controller.  It looked like I had loaded up the drivers o.k. but I didn’t get “New Hardware Found” and I couldn’t control the Paramount from the Libretto – strange.  Re-booted the computer and still nothing happened.  So started looking at the port allocations again and this time the USB to UART controller (basically the USB link from the Libretto to the Paramount) was there and had been allocated to COM 4 (???)  Don’t know what this is all about now but just clicked on COM 4 in The Sky for the communications link and Bingo – it all works.

One thing you should know should you ever be in the nice situation of being able to buy a Paramount – is that it kicks out a LOT of weird noise in the background, grumping, gurgling and harrooomfing away all the time.  According to Nik Szymanek this is all quite normal (thank you for letting me know this Nik, it sounds dreadful when you hear it for the first time!) so I guess the point is DON’T PANIC

I guess the next step in the mini-WASP saga will be getting the new dome erected, so might not be any news on this one until early 2011.

The Paramount has now been brought up to my study and is sutting on the Aluminium pier ready to be fired up.  Must admit I hadn’t planned for my study to be taken over with Astronomy equipment – but needs must.  Next step is to put the necessary software onto a laptop so that the Paramount can be computer-driven, power up the Paramount and see what happens.  Hopefully the next entry will be a video of the Paramount moving aound