A beautiful clear Moonless night last night – absolutely perfect for deep-sky imaging.  The Hyperstar III was on the case again, armed with PERFECT collimation!  Here we have the Rosette nebula in Monoceros, 27 subs at 500 seconds per sub.

A reprocess and crop of the previous image.

Said I would go back to this one with the Hyperstar on a Moonless night to do it justice – and last night was the night.  Managed to grab 32 subs at 5-minutes per sub before it clouded over around 10:00 p.m.  As an added bonus the chip flatness and collimation (plus focus) were just about spot on all night   As before North is downwards in this image.

Fellow PAIG forumite Harry Page signs off the New Forest Observatory “Deep-Sky Image of the Week” series with this stunning presentation of M33.  You can see full image details on Harry’s web-site here.  Thank you for your support of the DSIW Harry and also to the other fine contributions made to this page by fellow amateur imagers.

View to my south – tree lit up by the street lights.  Why Aldebaran is blue but Betelgeuse is the correct colour I have no idea.

Bellatrix in Orion taken with the Hypserstar III on Friday 13th January 2012 using 32 subs at 45-seconds per sub.

Saiph taken with the Hyperstar III on Friday 13th January 2012.  59 subs at 30 seconds per sub.  Can even see little PGC147980 at 7 O’clock on one of the bright stars near the bottom – mag 30!

Taken on the evening of Friday 13th January 2012 (living up to its reputation just about EVERYTHING went wrong this night) we have the NGC2174 region in Gemini known as the Monkey Head nebula.  I have North down in this image so that the Monkey’s Head is clearer to see.  What is amazing about this image is that it is just one hour’s worth of exposure time (6 x 10-minute subs) using the ultra-fast Hyperstar III system at f#2.  There was also an intrusive Moon playing havoc.  This turned out so well under adverse conditions that I feel I must do it justice by imaging it again on a Moonless night with maybe 5-minute subs just to get the total number of subs up.

Dimming every other star in the area is the brightest star in the sky at magnitude -1.46, the brilliant blue Sirius in the constellation Canis Major

Taken as an experiment immediately after 12 Victoria – 60 x 10-second subs.

Towards top left of this image you can see the elongated trail of asteroid 12 Victoria.  Around 50 subs at 3-minutes per sub with the Hyperstar III – bright Moon and a lot of thin high cloud but the asteroid still shone through.  The bright star should be red.  One thing to note, the images were dithered so that I could remove all the hot pixels with SDMask stacking – except if you use SDMask staking then it treats the asteroid trail as outliers and you lose your asteroid   So it is necessary to average stack which means you then need to manually remove all the hot pixels which is a right pain.