With the current weather I have not been able to set up the repaired M25C for any imaging and I am aware of the days ticking past with nothing new to add   Still, this gives me a little time to sit down and plan the next phase of the mini-WASP array.  Unfortunately the mini-WASP will not be up and running for this winter, looks more likely that this will now be a winter 2011 first light.  I didn’t get the decking and concrete pillar base in ready for the observatory and I think it will now be spring next year before I get that part done, so this winter it will be Hyperstar III imaging only (which is no bad thing).  Got a few nice projects noted on the whiteboard – now I just need the weather to play ball.  Having said that, it is this time of the year that I have had a 3-month imaging break due to the weather on more than one occasion!

Returning to the mini-WASP project – this will need to go into its own observatory dome so that I can run both the Hyperstar III and mini-WASP systems at the same time.  The first phase of the mini-WASP will use 2 x Sky 90 scopes together with two of the new Starlight Xpress M26C one-shot colour cameras.  A Megrez 80 and SX guide camera will occupy one slot of the mini-WASP array for the guiding.

In phase II (unknown date!) two further Sky 90s and M26C cameras will be added to the two remaining mini-WASP ports and the Megrez removed altogether.  One of the Sky 90s will have an OAG (SX) for guiding.  So the final mini-WASP system will be a four Sky 90, four M26C system giving a field of view of 6 x 4 degrees (that takes into account the frame overlap) a sampling of 3 arc seconds per pixel and 40 megapixels of data per sub download (36 megapixels of non-overlapped data).  I think the final system will produce some quite impressive images

I went over to what I thought was going to be a “dark” bit of the forest around 10:00 p.m. last night and got worse sky glow on the horizon (from Southampton) than I get in my back garden.  So the wife and I reccied another site about 3 miles away for future use and this one was quite a bit better – although there was the possibility of the odd car headlight giving low-level glare.  Anyway – came back home and set up in the garden again for a night of Perseid imaging.  It’s amazing that with a 180 degree FOV fish eye lens you can still see meteors that you don’t manage to image (usually because they run along behind the house – they have to have intelligence!).  Imaged for two hours and didn’t notice that it had got cold enough for dew to form on the fish eye lens, so the second hour’s imaging was a complete waste of time.  Visually, the display was reasonable but nothing particularly special – I seem to feel the same every Perseid session, I think I’m expecting a display from “The Day of the Triffids” and instead I get little more than you would expect on any dark, clear, Moonless night.  Not sure why I bother really.

Today it was brought home to me just how dangerous it is to work on your own in this imaging business.  Tom How is a local guy and an imaging expert, and we only recently realised that we hadn’t met up for (too many!) years.  So Tom popped over to Brockenhurst this morning to see what I had been up to in the intervening years.  Tom also educated me about darks, bias frames and flats, something he has spent a lot of time on getting properly sorted out on his system.  It was when he showed me the bias frame from my M25C that he immediately knew that something was wrong with the camera – there was a large top-to-bottom gradient.  As I’ve never looked at a bias frame before it meant nothing to me.  However – it did kick me into action – and the long and the short of it is that (after mailing Terry Platt) it looks like the Peltier cooler is open circuit.  I have no idea how long the CCD hasn’t been cooled, but I suspect it goes back to when the power supply gave up the ghost a couple of years ago!!  Blimey – Noel and I have been turning out some pretty nice images without a cooled CCD.  We were getting a bit cheesed off with the hot pixels mind you – and I was very surprised (after having used the H9C for a few years) that I couldn’t do a decent job on CTB1, the supernova remnant in Cassiopeia.  Now we know why!!  So it is a trip up to Starlight Xpress ASAP for some surgery on the M25C and hopefully we’ll see a big leap in image quality brought about by some decent chip cooling!!  If Tom hadn’t popped over and pushed me along to see about bias frames and the like I would have carried on in ignorance.  This is the risk you run if you work on your own in this technologically demanding hobby

Testing out my all-sky imaging rig ready for next week’s maximum in the Perseid meteor shower.  AstroTrac, Canon 5D MkII camera, Canon 15mm fish-eye lens and Canon electronic shutter controller.  You might just make out a faint Perseid bottom left in this image.

I intend taking the rig over to a dark spot in the Forest next week provided we get the clear skies.

Last night I managed to grab the frame to the right of the Cocoon nebula – whilst at the same time getting some ultra-wide-fields of the Perseids using the Canon 5D MkII, 15mm fish-eye lens and AstroTrac.  Anyway – I quickly bolted the Cocoon right hand frame on and what do I find?  In order to get all the dark nebulosity in the region I also need the two frames off the top and bottom as well!!  Talk about a go-deeper job.  Well at least we all know what this summer’s mega-project will be.

I am using a Bryan Mumford Time Machine and the high speed flash gear from http://www.highspeedflash.com/ to create some visually stunning images of water collisions – an example is here:

Some spikes added to the highlights using Noel Carboni’s plug-in  So this water drop collision took an exposure time of 9-millionths of a second, and the beer can pinhole camera project used a 6-month exposure time – that’s over 12 orders of magnitude difference in exposure time!

I also mounted two pinhole cameras outside the house on a south facing wall.  These cameras were based on beer cans as the Ilford photographic paper fits very nicely inside a standard size aluminium beer can.  Like the indoor cameras the exposure time was also 6-months, but it looks like the Sun’s path has come out a lot better on the outside cameras.  No vertical exposure streak either  The white fibreglass dome of the New Forest Observatory can be seen in the centre of the image.  The checkerboard pattern across the centre of the image is the patio, and sitting in the centre of the patio you can just make out the teak table and chairs.  Only thing wrong with this image is that I didn’t have the camera angled upwards enough to capture the Sun at the peak of its travel.  However – I have just reloaded the beer can cameras and put them back on the south facing wall, but they are now angled upwards by about 30 or so degrees so I should definitely get the Sun at its highest point tomorrow – the summer solstice

I’ve just opened the pinhole camera in my study (one day early).  This was behind the double glazing in a rectangular tea caddy tin box.  You can see the NFO dome towards the right, and a neighbour’s house over the road towards the left.  I think the almost vertical exposed line is a reflection off that neighbour’s bathroom window.  I don’t know what the boomerang shaped light in the sky towards the right is.  Clearly I didn’t angle the camera anywhere near enough to catch the Sun at the top of its travels so a good few months have been wasted.  Still living and learning

This one went absolutely everywhere and I’ll be cleaning up the mess for weeks.  It’s still far from perfect but I don’t think I’m capable of doing much better – so I’m calling it a day on the eggs.

Last night our faithful old cactus once again flowered and I caught the action with the Canon 40D and TC-80N3 timer controller.  So what is this doing on a deep-sky imaging web site?  I hope to use the same process to create animations of the night sky using the 40D and a 15mm Canon fisheye lens – should be an interesting summer night project.