Here is the second marathon processing session by Noel.  This time it’s the Belt region of Orion.  This image is mostly data from the Sky 90 and comprises RGB, H-alpha and H-beta taken over two frames.  There’s also a 3-frame Hyperstar I image of the Horsehead nebula thrown in for good measure

Noel has been very busy processing recently and the first to come back across the pond was this composite image of the North America and Pelican nebulae in Cygnus.  This is a composite image containing both Sky 90 and Hyperstar III data.  The full image is over 21 megapixels.

Noel has just completed some precision image processing on this latest Hyperstar III image taken over 3 nights. (more…)

More great news!!  Today we got the Jellyfish nebula (IC443) and its companion IC444 published as an Earth Science Picture of the Day.  This image was taken using the Sky 90 at f#4.5 and as well as full colour there was also H-alpha and Sulphur-II narrowband data added.  This image also shows a recently discovered planetary nebula that emits strongly in the infrared.  Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to show an interest in our work.

With under a couple of hours using 90-second subs I wasn’t expecting much from this one apart from the stars.  I was amazed at how well the nebulosity stood out - power of the Hyperstar!!!  Noel did a heroic job of processing out the huge lens flare around Gamma Cassiopeia.  I shall be definitely going back to this one to get a LOT more data for Noel to work with.

This is a 2-frame Hyperstar III mosaic of the NGC7788 region in Cassiopeia. This region is famous for having 6 open clusters in a line. However, towards the top of the frame (not visible in this image) is a fascinating supernova remnant CTB1 that I want to get. This will need to wait for dark skies and an attempt using very long sub-exposures.

On 10th October 2008 I managed to get 3 hours and 40-minutes worth of H-alpha data on the Heart nebula in Cassiopeia using 10-minute subs.  The Moon was causing all sorts of trouble and the seeing was poor which led to pretty mediocre data for Noel to work with.  However, Noel eventually managed to work his magic even with this one to give this very nice high-contrast result:

I can report that the hardware changes made a couple of days ago produced the expected result - tracking is now back to the very high accuracy I had when using the Hyperstar 1.  Unfortunately I also had to turn of the dither function in Maxim DL as it was taking the system far too long to come back into accurate tracking again, even after movements as small as half a pixel.  This unfortunately feeds through to Noel who now has the annoying hot pixels to deal with at the final processing stage.

Taken over several years this image is a composite of Hyperstar I, Sky 90 and Hyperstar III data. (more…)

The latest Parker/Carboni offering is the beautiful Iris nebula in the constellation Cepheus. (more…)