Panic over.  It is not an alien race trying to get our attention (shame) - but an extremely variable, variable star!  This little beauty is WY Cas lying just below the open cluster NGC7789 in Cassiopeia, and Noel created the animation from two separate images taken over a year apart.  (more…)

Noel has just processed a Sky 90/M25C image of an open cluster.  We had already imaged the same cluster a couple of years earlier with the Hyperstar 1 and SXV-H9C.  One very faint very red star of around magnitude 13 shows up as a bright orange magnitude 7 star in the latest data.  We have identified the star as a variable which may undergo mag 2 variations - but a 6 mag change is a bit steep by anyone’s standards!  We are looking into this a bit deeper and have sent the data to an expert at the BAA.  Watch this space.  New discovery?  Quite possibly

The high-resolution draft version of “Star Vistas” has now been electronically delivered to Springer.  Some suggestions for improvements in the text have been made, and Noel and I are working on these presently.

 There is a review of my “How to” book - “Making Beautiful Deep-Sky images” in the June 2008 issue of Astronomy Now written by Ed Sampson, and an interview with me on the following page in the same magazine.

Pop over to my Flickr site to see some hand held mosaics of Venice taken on a day trip this Wednesday.

Noel Carboni has literally just completed the last fine adjustments on the new deep-sky coffee-table book - Star Vistas.  He is now assembling the high-resolution version ready to send off to Springer.  We are hoping for publication early 2009.  I am now going to crack open a bottle of Champagne :)  Well done Noel!

I had a great evening in Clanfield last night with the Hampshire Astronomical Group who made me [the wife and the dog] most welcome.  If you are invited along by HAG to give a talk, I can highly recommend you go - very friendly, and very interesting meeting

I am giving a seminar to the Hampshire Astronomical Group at the Clanfield Memorial Hall tonight at 7.45 p.m.  You will be able to purchase signed copies of “Making Beautiful Deep-Sky Images” at a reduced rate.  See you there

The last Egogram to be sent out by Sir Arthur came to me on the 30th January 2008.  As you can see he was anticipating the next big milestone - 2010 - the year we make contact.

Sir Arthur Clarke                                                                          

EGOGRAM 2008

Friends, Earthlings, ETs – lend me your sensory organs!

I send you greetings and good wishes at the beginning of another year - and we’re getting closer to 2010, ‘the year we make contact’ (according to the book and film 2010: Odyssey Two). (more…)

I have just heard the terrible news that Sir Arthur C Clarke died today.  Sir Arthur transformed my life at age 19 when I started my first job at Harwell and began reading his mind-expanding Science Fiction.  As I told Sir Arthur in our e-mail discussions - his “Lion of Comarre” and “Against the Fall of Night” made a huge impact on a young impressionable mind, and I still get shivers when I read the closing line of “The Nine Billion Names of God”.

I feel cheated that I never met Sir Arthur in person, although I have been planning a Sri Lanka trip for just that reason for the last couple of years, and like most things, I didn’t get round to it.  I felt there was still plenty more time.

You will see the tribute to Patrick Moore’s 50 years on the Sky at Night on this site and in Astronomy Now written by Sir Arthur in honour of his long-term friend.  Sir Patrick and Sir Arthur shared many life-coincidences, and they also shared authorship of the book “Asteroid” which was published to raise funds for the tsunami appeal.

 Today is a very sad day - we have lost a visionary and in my opinion the greatest Science Fiction writer of all time.  Is it full of stars I wonder?

The last few days Noel has been working right through the night to get the images sorted for Star Vistas.  As I write this, Noel is working on the mammoth Veil Nebula data set.  In a previous post you can see the upper region of the Veil, and Noel just sent me a “taster” of the lower Veil region.  This is going to be a classic!  Keep viewing this site - it will be posted soon

I used the Robofocus for the first time last night.  Beautiful clear Moonless night, not what you usually get when you are trying out a new piece of astro gear.  There is an auto Wizard jobby that comes with FocusMax that does everything for you.  It says to click on the “go” button and “sit back and watch the show” :)  It really is a great show and the setting up was effortless using the Wizard.  I can “fine tune” the system manually later.  What are the results?  Well after manually focusing for a few years now I think I can probably do as good a job as the Robofocus, but not as quickly.  Also, once you’ve calibrated your system, then clicking on “focus” will let Robofocus loose to focus your system which it will do in less than 90 seconds (in my case).  And that for me is where the power of the Robofocus lies!  I don’t think it can focus a great deal better than me, but I used it to check focus after each hour of imaging - and that is something I certainly wouldn’t consider doing with manual focusing.