Moon blazing away overhead, so not a great night for deep-sky imaging – BUT – a great night for the planets.  We not only have Jupiter and Venus competing with the Moon as brightest objects in the sky, but also low down on the western horizon we can see the other red planet – little Mercury   Superb night and I was a bit of a twit only taking a few “stills” – this was a perfect evening to have a go at an animation of the setting Mercury, but I only thought of that once I got back home   One day I WILL get my act together!

This afternoon I received the most amazing piece of glass to review – it is simply beautiful.  The Sky-Watcher ED100 f#5.0 quintuplet refractor.  Now I have yet to put this beast through its paces, but if its performance comes anywhere near close to its looks then Sky-Watcher have got themselves a “Tak-killer” on their hands.  This is going to be an equipment review I am REALLY going to enjoy doing   Not been this excited about a piece of hardware for a VERY long time.  Photos to follow.

I have 4 (relatively new!) 2Tb hard drives in an “Icy Dock” station for data storage/backup of all the astronomy data and the main computer.  Now last night one of these drives decides to play stupid   O.K. I have been caught out really badly before now, so now there’s only one thing for it – a job I have put off for months - time to start getting all your valuable deep-sky data burned on to Blu-Ray discs.  So I’m making a start on what will be a marathon data transfer session.  So far I’ve burned 4 x 25Gb Blu-Ray discs, at least another 20 to go I reckon.

Yipppeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee – it’s Galaxy season once again – I love Galaxy season.  Although I am working on a mega-sized mosaic of the Virgo/Coma region, the image I have chosen for this month is the well-known Leo Trio of Galaxies in the constellation Leo.

In this original Hyperstar 2-frame image using the little H9C camera I have north to the left and the northern most galaxy (the Hamburger galaxy) is NGC3628 almost exactly edge-on to us with a very remarkable dust lane as you can see.  Moving to the right (south) we then come across a most useful guide star – SAO 99552 or HIP 55262 – blazing away at magnitude 7.12 and certainly the brightest star in the area.  Continuing south we then arrive at the Messier pair, M65 on the top and M66 underneath – two very nice examples of spiral galaxies with nice colours and very clear dust lanes.  This image is a 2-framer as the tiny H9C camera only gave me a small field of view, and at this time I was only using short subs with the original Hyperstar, in this case just 2-minutes per sub.  Each frame was a total of 4-hours imaging time and I can still recall how very lucky I was when I took these frames in that I had two clear nights in a row so I was able to get this particular job done and dusted very quickly, in the same year (very often my 2-framer efforts over run into the following year which is very frustrating).  NGC3628 is worth your special attention as coming out underneath the centre of the galaxy there is a long string of quasars which you can just barely make out in this image.

The Leo Trio is exceptional in that there are 3 such bright, large galaxies, all lying close together for a perfect framing composition – and a bright guide star is thrown in for good measure too.  What more can you ask for?

Until next month – clears skies to you all!

I learnt a number of new tricks putting together the recent comet Garradd animation so I applied them to the old comet Lulin data – big improvement!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12801949@N02/6794918782/

The reason the comet’s tail disappears after the satellite crosses the screen is that at this point up rolled the thin high cloud – typical!!

One thing you should note – it is not the World’s greatest idea to dither your “stills” if you later want to use the data to create an animation.  I will try to do better next time

You can see the animation here.

Beautiful clear evening all night last night but I packed up at 2:30 in the morning after starting at 7:45 p.m. the evening before.  This time the target was comet Garradd moving below Ursa Major and above Draco.  I wasted half an hour finding it by eye instead of taking the co-ordinates out with me, and then I wasted another hour of good imaging time by dithering the data which causes me to lose 45-seconds between each sub.  I guess I still have a lot to learn   Anyway here is a very quick and very nasty process of last night’s data – a lot more could be done with it and I’m sure I’ll go over it again and again in the next few weeks.  I think next time I will autoguide on the comet itself and let the stars trail – I might also cut down to 3-minute subs which should be sufficient.

Don’t forget to buy the Sunday Telegraph tomorrow and get your Deep-Sky Objects glossy brochure with my Pleiades image on the cover.  Unfortunately I think there’s only one of my images inside (not several) but I guess that’s better than none at all

A new Copyright Notice can be found in the Image Gallery section of this web site.

The Hyperstar III only data from last weekend without the lower resolution Sky 90 (Cone nebula) data added.  I now really want to get some frames off the top to see more of that fascinating dark nebulosity