Category Archives: Projects

Projects undertaken at New Forest Observatory

Ultra long sub-exposure photography

Posted on September 5, 2009 by Greg Parker

I have just made up 2 beer can pinhole cameras (see Justin Quinnell’s website to see how to do this) and fitted them to a wooden frame on a South-facing wall of the house.  I have opened the shutter (removed … Continue reading →

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Eggs – scrambled

Posted on July 4, 2009 by Greg Parker

And to finish off yesterday’s theme I just had to try to capture the action when a 0.22″ air rifle pellet says hello to a raw egg – or two. Note the pellet exiting stage left in the first image!

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From ultra-long exposures to ultra high-speed flash photography

Posted on July 3, 2009 by Greg Parker

From one extreme to the other 🙂  Some of my longest total exposure times in astrophotography exceed 60 hours!!  At the other end of the scale I also carry out high-speed photography using flash equipment that kicks out 9 microsecond … Continue reading →

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Fractal sharpening a new digital processing tool from Noel Carboni

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Greg Parker

Although I am still imaging in inner space, at least the latest venture has an astro-imaging application.  I have just purchased Noel Carboni’s Fractal Sharpening tool which works with Genuine Fractals (also purchased at the same time) and Adobe Photoshop.  … Continue reading →

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Inner space – another Parker/Carboni digital image collaboration

Posted on June 16, 2009 by Greg Parker

I have been playing around again with the microscope and Helicon Focus.  Now although this is not deep-sky imaging, a lot of the data collection and data processing is very similar to deep-sky work.  First of all you need to … Continue reading →

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From outer space to inner space

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Greg Parker

I purchased a good quality microscope for those (many) evenings that are unsuitable for deep-space imaging.  The idea is to fit the Canon 40D to the microscope’s third eyepiece (it is a trinocular microscope) and take some photomicrographs – using … Continue reading →

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Boxing Day 2008 at the New Forest Observatory

Posted on December 26, 2008 by Greg Parker

It is the first clear day in ages – makes a great change from the dull, dark, grey, completely overcast days we have been experiencing for quite a while now.  This is the view towards the West from the New … Continue reading →

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Update on the mini-WASP deep-sky imaging array

Posted on December 23, 2008 by Greg Parker

There hasn’t been a huge amount of progress since the last report.  The only change to the array is that I’ve now added the second Sky 90 to the frame as I now use the lightweight Celestron 80mm refractor to … Continue reading →

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The NFO at night with Orion for company

Posted on December 21, 2008 by Greg Parker

Last night there were some breaks in the cloud and it was also unusually mild.  So I took the 40D outside on the tripod (I should have taken the TT320 as well but I wasn’t thinking straight yesterday for reasons … Continue reading →

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Smoke alarm fitted!

Posted on December 6, 2008 by Greg Parker

I have security alarms, and a fire extinguisher handy for the observatory – but it took a recent catastrophic failure of a PSU to make me think about putting a smoke alarm in there!  Fortunately I had two battery operated … Continue reading →

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