Archive for the “Announcements” Category

Jul 10 2007

mini-WASP Array Project

Posted by Greg Parker in Announcements, mini-WASP Array

The name for this project comes from the Wide Angle Search for Planets or SuperWASP project.   As you can guess it is used for hunting exo-planets.  

If you look at the SuperWASP site you will see an impressive imaging array comprising 8 Canon 200mm f#1.8 lenses with their associated Andor CCD cameras all sitting on a massive torus fork mount – certainly very nice gear!

Living in the U.K. we have a major problem to contend with trying to pursue our hobby – the weather.  There are very few good clear Moonless nights to take those perfect images.  I have also compounded the problem by moving from a very fast (Hyperstar) imaging system that worked at f#1.85, to a much slower refractor-based system working at only f#4.5, i.e. six times slower. 

I’m going to tackle this problem piece by piece and I will be posting details of my thoughts in the mini-WASP Array category.  You can also see a list of the posts below:

I hope you’ll keep reading as I learn about what is needed and my experiences of putting together such an exciting piece of equipment.

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Jan 11 2007

Summer 2007 Imaging Project: The Veil Nebula in Cygnus

Posted by Greg Parker in Announcements, Veil Nebula

I’m thinking ahead about the deep-sky object that I will concentrate on for the short summer nights.  I am really impressed with the image of the Veil nebula on Davide de Martin’s Skyfactory site where he has processed this superb image using Palomar POSS II data.

I think I’d really like to give this one a good try, however that field of view (FOV) of 4.2 x 4.4 degrees would mean a 2-frame mosaic with the Sky 90/M25C combination, and I’m not too happy about spending that much time on just one object, especially with short evenings.

However, Steve Cannistra has also imaged the Veil region with a set up that has a very similar field of view to mine and although it doesn’t get the whole of the region in the frame, it still makes a very impressive image.

Taking all things into account, I will try to get a very deep single-frame image of the veil region using the one-shot camera and the usual Hutech IDAS light pollution filter. 

I know from the previous work I carried out on the Witch’s Broom region of the veil with the Sky 90/SXV-H9C combination that the one-shot is fine for this purpose. 

The only thing that I don’t know is how good (or not) the one-shot will be at picking up the faint stuff between the Eastern and Western veil regions.  I guess the only way to find out will be to image the thing this summer :-)

I’m going to be posting more about the Veil Nebula project and you can follow my progress in the Veil Nebula Category or by clicking on the links below [which also happen to be from the Veil Nebula category]:

The diagram from Cartes du Ciel will give you an indication of where the Veil Nebula is in the night sky:

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