Keep an eye on Meridian News & Weather tonight from 6:00 p.m. onwards as you should see the New Forest Observatory and me discussing the Perseid meteor shower.  There may be a cameo appearance by Louey the black Labrador as well.

I went over to what I thought was going to be a “dark” bit of the forest around 10:00 p.m. last night and got worse sky glow on the horizon (from Southampton) than I get in my back garden.  So the wife and I reccied another site about 3 miles away for future use and this one was quite a bit better – although there was the possibility of the odd car headlight giving low-level glare.  Anyway – came back home and set up in the garden again for a night of Perseid imaging.  It’s amazing that with a 180 degree FOV fish eye lens you can still see meteors that you don’t manage to image (usually because they run along behind the house – they have to have intelligence!).  Imaged for two hours and didn’t notice that it had got cold enough for dew to form on the fish eye lens, so the second hour’s imaging was a complete waste of time.  Visually, the display was reasonable but nothing particularly special – I seem to feel the same every Perseid session, I think I’m expecting a display from “The Day of the Triffids” and instead I get little more than you would expect on any dark, clear, Moonless night.  Not sure why I bother really.

After a completely overcast day the cloud began to break up around 5:00 p.m. and now (9:00 p.m.) it looks like we might actually have a reasonably clear night.  Whooppeeeeeeeeee – I’m off over the forest with the AstroTrac Canon 5D and 15mm fish eye lens to grab some Perseids   There was just too much light pollution from the street lights in my back garden to do a proper job with this setup, so I’m going in a nice large flat field right next to our allotments to hopefully get some dark sky imaging.  I’ll report on the outcome of this evening’s efforts tomorrow – provided it stays clear long enough to get started.

Starlight Xpress returned the repaired CCD via Special Delivery just after lunchtime today!  I re-fitted it to the Hyperstar III and ran off a bias frame – Tom How confirms it now looks o.k. and we’re once again hot to trot  Thank you Michael Hattey and Terry Platt of Starlight Xpress for such wonderful service!!!  I can’t recommend SX highly enough for your deep-sky imaging CCD requirements (and filter wheels, and guide cameras, and AO systems, and ………….)

Looking back over the images taken it appears that the cooler failed on January 17th 2010 – so nowhere near as long ago as I thought, and it wasn’t at the time the PSU went down.  The number of hot pixels dramatically increased in the images, and the noise may have gone up a tad, but apart from the hot pixels there wasn’t too much to show for it (apart from the extra unnecessary processing Noel would have had to have carried out Interesting!  Down to the high speed of the Hyperstar and the short sub-exposure times.  If I worked at higher f-numbers the Peltier failure would have been more quickly recognised that’s for sure.

My M25C one-shot colour camera had an open circuit Peltier cooler (see post below).  Packed it and shipped it off Recorded Delivery yesterday (Monday) around 1:00 p.m.  Just got a mail from Michael Hattey 4:30 p.m. today (Tuesday) that it’s been fixed and is ready to be shipped back.  How’s that for fantastic service!

This is one (major) reason why I wouldn’t even consider a CCD camera not made in the U.K.

Today it was brought home to me just how dangerous it is to work on your own in this imaging business.  Tom How is a local guy and an imaging expert, and we only recently realised that we hadn’t met up for (too many!) years.  So Tom popped over to Brockenhurst this morning to see what I had been up to in the intervening years.  Tom also educated me about darks, bias frames and flats, something he has spent a lot of time on getting properly sorted out on his system.  It was when he showed me the bias frame from my M25C that he immediately knew that something was wrong with the camera – there was a large top-to-bottom gradient.  As I’ve never looked at a bias frame before it meant nothing to me.  However – it did kick me into action – and the long and the short of it is that (after mailing Terry Platt) it looks like the Peltier cooler is open circuit.  I have no idea how long the CCD hasn’t been cooled, but I suspect it goes back to when the power supply gave up the ghost a couple of years ago!!  Blimey – Noel and I have been turning out some pretty nice images without a cooled CCD.  We were getting a bit cheesed off with the hot pixels mind you – and I was very surprised (after having used the H9C for a few years) that I couldn’t do a decent job on CTB1, the supernova remnant in Cassiopeia.  Now we know why!!  So it is a trip up to Starlight Xpress ASAP for some surgery on the M25C and hopefully we’ll see a big leap in image quality brought about by some decent chip cooling!!  If Tom hadn’t popped over and pushed me along to see about bias frames and the like I would have carried on in ignorance.  This is the risk you run if you work on your own in this technologically demanding hobby

Testing out my all-sky imaging rig ready for next week’s maximum in the Perseid meteor shower.  AstroTrac, Canon 5D MkII camera, Canon 15mm fish-eye lens and Canon electronic shutter controller.  You might just make out a faint Perseid bottom left in this image.

I intend taking the rig over to a dark spot in the Forest next week provided we get the clear skies.

Last night I managed to grab the frame to the right of the Cocoon nebula – whilst at the same time getting some ultra-wide-fields of the Perseids using the Canon 5D MkII, 15mm fish-eye lens and AstroTrac.  Anyway – I quickly bolted the Cocoon right hand frame on and what do I find?  In order to get all the dark nebulosity in the region I also need the two frames off the top and bottom as well!!  Talk about a go-deeper job.  Well at least we all know what this summer’s mega-project will be.

Just a reminder that the Star Vistas Exhibition at the ArtSway gallery is now just one month off – put it in your diary now if you want to see the latest and best images from the New Forest Observatory.