New Forest Observatory ®

Moon blazing away overhead last night, but it was nice and clear up to around 11:00 p.m.  So what to image?  How about a nice Carbon star?  This little beauty is UU Aurigae in the constellation Auriga (SAO 59280) and makes a fine centrepiece to this image.  There are a couple of faint fuzzies to be found in the background as well, an unexpected bonus.  34 subs at 3-minutes per sub, dithered, taken using the Hyperstar III on the Celestron Nexstar GPS C11 with the M25C one-shot colour CCD.

Here is a colour and negative B&W version of the on-going Virgo/Coma galaxies mega-mosaic.  Over 4 years in the making so far, this image stretches from M58 in the bottom left hand corner right up to M100 in the top right.  Each image measures 4.42 x 5.16 degrees where the diameter of a full Moon is just half a degree (like the Sun).  The image comprises over 10 individual frames and a total imaging time well in excess of 40-hours.  I will not be taking such large fields of view with the Hyperstar III in future, that’s the whole purpose of putting the mini-WASP array together.  However it is very satisfying to see such a big field of view at the relatively high resolution of 2.85 arc seconds per pixel.

The Virgo/Coma galaxies mega-mosaic went together a lot easier than I was expecting.  A few tiny bits of extra processing to be done on this one, but here is the negative B&W version so you can scroll around all those galaxies.  Enjoy 🙂

I managed to get enough decent data last night, despite the sky being full of water vapour and a very intrusive Moon, to fill in the annoying “notch” on the Markarian Chain mega-mosaic.  I have just bolted the last three frames to the main mosaic to check that everything fits together and haven’t bothered with any blending yet.  So there it is – and there it will stay for a while too, I think I’ve just about had enough with this one.  It’s a nice day so I’m going out to cut the grass 🙂

Here is the lower-left hand panel for the on-going Virgo/Coma galaxies mega-mosaic image.  Want to hear some pain?  The Siamese-Twins at the bottom of the image fall off the bottom of the rest of the mosaic by a fraction 🙁 🙁  I don’t think this mosaic will ever come to an end.  Maybe it’s just the beginning of the full Northern Hemisphere sky survey with the Hyperstar III?  I think it might be.

This is my second attempt at a comet Garradd animation – this time without dithering between subs 🙂  The “jumps” in comet motion are due to lost subs.