New Forest Observatory ®

Picture of the Week is the Flaming Star and Tadpoles nebulae (IC405/IC410) region of Auriga. The Flaming Star nebula has that very nice patch of reflection nebulosity (blue) at the top.

This is the accumulation of many hours (certainly more than 12-hours) of data on the Sky90 array using the M26C OSC CCDs. Sub-exposure time mostly 20-minutes.

This is yet another image that doesn’t benefit much from a few more hours of additional data, so this is another one I can call completed from this site.

Picture of the Week this time is a Sky90 MiniWASP array composite of the Cygnus Wall, Weasel, and Pelican’s Head region. I seem to get drawn to this area every year as the new imaging season starts. Well over 8-hours of data on this one and the nebulosity has been enhanced by using some star reduction courtesy of Russ Croman’s StarXterminator and Noel Carboni’s plug-in to run StarXterminator in a way that allows gradual star reduction rather than total star elimination.

Picture of the Week this time is Messier 45, the Pleiades star cluster in Taurus with the associated (blue) reflection nebulosity, and the (brown) Taurus molecular cloud.

This is 18-hours worth of 40-minute subs taken with the 3 x Sky90s and 3 x M26C OSC CCDs on the MiniWASP array.

I added 6-hours of data to the existing 12-hours to get the current 18-hours and saw very little (approaching zero) improvement over the 12-hours of exposure time. I am therefore well within the diminishing returns region, and I’d only start seeing ANY improvement by probably going to something like 36-hours of exposure time. That being the case I can safely say that for my location, this is about the best I am going to do, and this therefore is another completed object.

Well I have on my calendar that Picture of the Week for today was Altair and Barnard’s “E”. So it was a bit of a surprise to come to the site today and find nothing has been updated. No idea what happened there :}

Never mind, day after my BIG Birthday I pulled myself together and put the image up.

This is a 2-frame mosaic using the Canon 200mm prime lenses and the ASI 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras. 5 hours of 10-minute subs per frame. Alshain (very light-orange star bottom left), Altair (blue-white star centre), Tarazed (orange star top right, next to Barnard’s “E”) are the 3 stars you can see visually when you look towards Altair. Barnard’s “E” is the very nice dark nebula on the right of Tarazed. I also took this image using the M26C OSC CCDs and the current image definitely benefits from the lower noise CMOS cameras.

Our Picture of the Week is the famous Perseus Double-Cluster which hangs like a pair of charms from the ring of stars I call “Greg’s Charm Bracelet”. At the top is beautiful open cluster Stock 2 which looks like a stick-man lying on his side. This is a 2-frame mosaic taken on the Sky90 array with each frame comprising 4-hours of 10-minute subs.

I am particularly happy in the way the star colour turned out in this image, which almost certainly means this is a Noel Carboni processed image.