New Forest Observatory ®

Last night was the 8th clear night in a row – a new record.

Previously I managed to blow all the power MOSFETs in the dome rotator, so I spent all Monday morning replacing same (8 MOSFETs to de-solder, remove and replace). Fortunately there was no other damage to the stepper motor printed circuit board.

So the first image post repair was this one of Castor & Pollux.

This was only 10 x 5-minute subs (half the number of subs I usually like to take) but at least it shows everything is working again. However – as the Moon is now becoming obtrusive it might be a while before there are any new images, even if the sky is clear – we’ll see.

I am not able to keep up with the images I have taken this week as I am so unused to having several clear nights in a row. Having just changed over to UV/IR cut filters on the 200mm lenses to carry out star work, the first star region I chose to image a few nights back was M44 in Cancer. I managed to get 20 x 10-minute subs before I hit the Meridian and packed up for the night. I had done this one before with the M26C OSC CCDs, so why did I do it again with the ASI 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras? I have been highly impressed with the CMOS cameras and I was expecting to see an order of magnitude improvement in the image. And the result? No real discernible improvement! This is actually a very good thing. It means there is absolutely no need to go over all my old M26C images and repeat all that work with the CMOS cameras – that was something I was really not looking forward to doing.

So here I present to you – for the second time – M44, the Beehive Cluster sitting within the Stargate – the 4 central bright stars in the constellation Cancer.

Yet another clear night last night – almost unbelievable. So as I had just removed the narrowband filters from the 200mm lenses and replaced them with the UV/IR cut filters, I had rather creased myself and wasn’t sure what to image. Just because it was in a suitable position in the sky I chose the Meissa nebulosity sitting at the top of Orion, and I managed to get 24 x 10-minute subs on the region. A fairly boring image resulted and I think the blue glow around the central stars was high cloud/water vapour – but I’ll check on that.

However, keeping an eye on the downloads I did spot a pulsing light on 2 of the subs. As it appeared on both cameras it was clearly not an electronics glitch. I processed those 2 subs separately and cropped down to the pulsing light – North is to the right. Looks like a tumbling piece of space junk but I’m no expert on these things and it could just as easily be Aliens 🙂