Beautiful clear night last night, and a non-intrusive Moon for imaging in the Leo region.  12 x 5-minutes subs on the M100 region and the speed of the Hyperstar really shows through.  Need more data on this for a quality image, but this result is pretty acceptable for just one hour’s worth of imaging.

 

Today (19/03/2018) saw the publication of EPOD number 99 for me.

A big 2-frame panorama of the Bellatrix region with a large galaxy cluster on the right hand side of the frame.

Look out for EPOD number 100 next month.

Clear until 9:00 p.m. last night with a very intrusive Moon.  Saw that Ceres was well-placed in Cancer so put the Sky 90 array on the region.

Ended up with 18 x 15-minute subs.  Can even see Ceres in the SDMask stacked colour image as it is moving so slowly and is so bright (when I first saw it on the subs I thought it was a star as it was actually brighter than all the surrounding stars).  For orientation that is SAO61102 in the centre (guide star).

In the B&W image you can see there is another asteroid below Ceres (that isn’t on the Sky 6).  And it is also worth noting that Ceres is shown in the wrong position on the Sky 6 – call up the live Ephemeris on Ceres to get its actual position if you want to image it.

From last night, 21 x 10-minute subs on the Sky 90 array.  Blazing half Moon causing trouble but as it was a beautiful clear (bitterly cold) night I imaged anyway.  Couldn’t be bothered to process out the plane trail.

From last night, lovely blue Gomeisa or Beta Canis Majoris.  36 x 10-minute subs on the Sky 90 array – and yes the averaged data shows a very nice asteroid near the centre of the image.

Doesn’t look like we have a clear sky tonight so the run of clear Moonless nights has come to an end.

Had my eye on a big band of rain and cloud running right down the East coast last night – by some miracle it just kept clear of Hampshire.  So yet ANOTHER clear and Moonless night for imaging.

Decided to set the Sky 90 array up on a Carbon star in Gemini, SAO79474 or N Q Geminorum.  As luck would have it, there was also an asteroid 73 Klytia in the same FOV.

Images of the asteroid and Carbon star below.  The small bunches of tiny “stars” in the asteroid image are hot pixels as the asteroid data is “average” combined in order to keep the asteroid.  As this is dithered data there are no hot pixels in the Carbon star image as that has been SDMask combined.

Beautiful clear Moonless sky last night – hard to know where to point the telescopes.  Decided on the Bubble nebula region and the 2 x Canon 200mm prime lenses together with the 2 x Trius M26C OSC CCDs.  “Claws” is not coming out as well as I’d expected with 14 x 30-minute subs and I think this is all down to my rapidly deteriorating skyglow.  I guess a move might be on the cards after all.

Managed to get some imaging in 2 nights ago (Jan 18th 2018) and got 30 x 10-minute subs on 8 Flora, middle of run at 21:32.

You can see to the right and a little bit down from Flora there is another reasonably bright asteroid.  Any ideas what this is?  It does not show up on my version of the Sky 6.

A couple of nights back we had an extremely rare clear, Moonless night.  Gremlins were at work as I have hardly used the kit in almost a year – never mind.  Managed to get 4 x 30-minute subs on the Belt of Orion using the 200mm lenses and the Trius M26C OSC CCDs.

As there were only 4 subs the image is very noisy and the stacker doesn’t get rid of plane trails when 2 of the 4 subs have plane trails on them.  However, what this image does show is that the framing of the Belt is just about perfect with the 200mm lenses and if I ever see another clear, Moonless night, I am going to have to return to this and get a load more subs.