This week we feature the Propus region of Gemini which of course contains the well-known Jellyfish nebula, and if your field of view is big enough, the Monkeyhead nebula and open cluster M35 (and neighbouring open cluster NGC2158) as well. This is a composite image combining 200mm lens data (the whole field of view) together with Hyperstar/Sky90 data for each nebula, and the open cluster, taken separately.
Imagine you are a photon.
You suddenly come into existence, and without the passing of any time, and without travelling any distance, you suddenly disappear again. Did you even exist? Well you must have done because an astrophotographer on planet Earth captured you on his camera after you had travelled 10 billion light years from the galaxy he was imaging. So you existed for 10 billion years and travelled for 10 billion light years when you felt that you had not existed at all.
How do you reconcile this?
I just combined last night’s 24 x 5-minute subs 200mm lens single framer with an older 40 x 5-minute subs 2-framer also using the 200mm lenses. This is the resulting Arcturus composite.
Managed to get some imaging done last night. Arcturus with the 200mm lenses and 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras. 24 x 5-minute subs. Note the “Napoleon’s Hat” asterism at the bottom of the lower spike slightly to the right.
This week we feature the whole of Canis Minor, which is fortunately only 2 stars, but they are quite well separated. The 200mm lenses are of short enough focal length to capture both in the frame. There are only a small number of very small (Northern) constellations that can be imaged with 3-frames or less with the 200mm lenses, and Canis Minor is one of them.
This is everything I have on Markarian’s Chain from the original Hyperstar, the Hyperstar III, the Hyperstar 4, and the Sky90 array. Must be more than 20-hours in total, probably more than 30. So why doesn’t it look a lot better than that? Probably a combination of skyglow and being down in the murk in the South as well.
This week we feature the huge Ha region in Cepheus designated IC1396. This is a 2-frame mosaic using a single Sky90 and M25C OSC CCD. Comprising RGB, narrowband Ha and narrowband OIII, this took the record for the longest total integration time for quite a while. I think I would like to redo this region with the 200mm lenses and the Optolong L-Enhance filters next.
The collimation was quite a way out when I imaged the Leo Trio 2 nights ago, so last night I was expecting to spend the whole evening trying to get good collimation. In preparation for this I had taken off the dew-shield and re-balanced the scope in the afternoon.
Come 9 p.m. and I was in the south dome observatory ready to collimate the Hyperstar 4. I turned one of the collimation screws (quite a bit) and was preparing myself for a long drawn out evening’s work twiddling collimation screws. Ran CCDInspector and nearly fainted as it showed me perfect collimation on the very first try. The magic 0, 0, 0 for X offset, Y offset and collimation. So not wanting to move anything I simply started imaging on the second setup star I was on which happened to be Denebola. So here are 30 subs at 150-seconds per sub on bright star Denebola in the constellation Leo.
IMAGING!!!!!
Collimation was well out on the Hyperstar and I thought it was going to take all night to get good collimation. First tweak on the collimation adjuster and I hit perfect collimation – took all of 2 minutes. So I didn’t move anything and started imaging on the second setup star – Denebola. 150-second subs.
It was clear last night with a thin crecent Moon about to set, so I fired up the Hyperstar 4 on the C11. Target the Leo Trio. 4-minute subs with a 1-minute dither so I was planning on getting 15 subs before calling it a night. Managed to get down 12 subs when the computer suddenly rebooted – it wasn’t even connected to the Internet! So I had to make do with 48-minutes worth of subs (nothing to write home about) which I added to earlier data to get the above result. Didn’t add much (if anything) probably helped by the collimation being out a bit. So if it’s clear again tonight (quite likely) then it’ll be collimation time so that I am set up for galaxy season.
