New Forest Observatory ®

Picture of the week for the beginning of August 2025 shows the 12 brightest stars that I can image from my south of England location.

This week we feature the only bit of blue in a sea of red which is the reflection nebula NGC6914 in Cygnus. This is a composite image including Sky90 + tiny little H9C data which only imaged the NGC6914 region itself, plus Sky90/M26C data of 4 hours of 3-minute subs RGB data, plus 4-hours of 6-minute subs H-alpha data, for the bigger frame.

This week features just about all the data I have on the Cygnus Wall region of the North America nebula. This includes Sky90 and Hyperstar III/IV data and must be well over 24 hours of total exposure time, possibly well over 30 hours. This is a region that I feel benefits from having no stars to distract from the nebula.

This week is a cropped 2-frame mosaic of the Sadr and Butterfly nebula region across to the Crescent nebula region in Cygnus. This will be around 8-hours exposure time per frame using the 200mm lenses and the 2100MC Pro CMOS cameras with both UV/IR and L-Enhance filters (used separately).

I had taken many hours of M13 data using just about every piece of kit I have (except the 200mm lenses) – but I had never checked it to see if I could find the “propeller”. So I checked my deepest M13 image with a PILE of data (MANY hours) – and there it was. So this week we feature the propeller in M13 🙂 

I take a break from astrophotography this week to show instead a pinhole photograph of 6-months of solar travel across my southern horizon. This exposure is from Winter Solstice 2021 until SUmmer Solstice 2022.

This week we feature a 200mm lens/M26C OSC CCD 2-frame mosaic of the IC2087 region in the massive Taurus Molecular Cloud region. A total of in excess of 15 hours of exposure time went into this one, and as you can see from the image, it could do with even more.

This week we feature a rarely imaged Coddington’s Nebula (which is in fact a spiral galaxy) in Ursa Major. Over 10-hours of total exposure time using the Sky90 array.

Over 15-hours on the California nebula using the Sky90 array and the M26C OSC CCDs.

This week’s “Picture of the Week” is another Carbon star, this time W Orionis in the constellation Orion. Also designated SAO112406 and HD32736 this image comprises 15 x 10-minute subs on the Sky90 array using the M26C OSC CCDs.