New Forest Observatory ®

Another clear evening last night (we’ve had a good run this last week) and I got 13 x 10-minute subs with the 200mm lenses on the M106 region. If I make a 2-framer out of this by getting the frame on the left as well I will also get La Superba in the frame! Sounds like a project. However 13 subs is not enough for a nice smooth background, so I need to get more on M106 itself. A new one for me can be seen bottom left – this is the Box galaxy NGC4449, not imaged that one before so I got an unexpected bonus.

I need to get that 3rd 200mm lens up and running ASAP so that I can get all the necessary data down in one evening (like I used to do with the Sky90s). Now if I could only have 5 x 200mm lenses running at the same time.

A beautiful, completely clear, Moonless night last night, and warm as well!

I imaged from 10 p.m. until 1:15 a.m. with the 200mm lenses and 2600MC Pro Cmos cameras.

Two targets:

1. A star field in Ursa Major.
2. Arcturus.

The star field in Ursa Major did not look anything like it appeared on the Sky6, so I won’t be showing it here. Arcturus on the other hand with 18 x 250-second subs turned out quite nicely. Last night’s data is shown above and now I will go away and look for all the other Arcturus data taken on the 200mm lenses and see if I can put it all together.

Fired up the 2 x 200mm lenses and 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras last night. Started at astronomical darkness (now 10:00 p.m.!!!) and finished when the mount hit the Meridian and also cloud started rolling in from the West at 12:30 a.m.

Only 10 x 15-minute subs in total, but that was enough to give a reasonably noise-free background.

It was clear from last night’s outing that I am on the point of needing to replace all the old computers in the North Dome (that’s 5 of them) which is a bit of a pain, but it’s been on the cards for a while now.

The collimation by the way was PERFECT for both lenses last night, yes I got the magic 0,0,0 on CCDInspector. So all in all I was very pleased with last night’s session.