I learnt a number of new tricks putting together the recent comet Garradd animation so I applied them to the old comet Lulin data – big improvement!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12801949@N02/6794918782/
The reason the comet’s tail disappears after the satellite crosses the screen is that at this point up rolled the thin high cloud – typical!!
One thing you should note – it is not the World’s greatest idea to dither your “stills” if you later want to use the data to create an animation. I will try to do better next time 🙂
You can see the animation here.
Beautiful clear evening all night last night but I packed up at 2:30 in the morning after starting at 7:45 p.m. the evening before. This time the target was comet Garradd moving below Ursa Major and above Draco. I wasted half an hour finding it by eye instead of taking the co-ordinates out with me, and then I wasted another hour of good imaging time by dithering the data which causes me to lose 45-seconds between each sub. I guess I still have a lot to learn 🙂 Anyway here is a very quick and very nasty process of last night’s data – a lot more could be done with it and I’m sure I’ll go over it again and again in the next few weeks. I think next time I will autoguide on the comet itself and let the stars trail – I might also cut down to 3-minute subs which should be sufficient.
Don’t forget to buy the Sunday Telegraph tomorrow and get your Deep-Sky Objects glossy brochure with my Pleiades image on the cover. Unfortunately I think there’s only one of my images inside (not several) but I guess that’s better than none at all 🙂
A new Copyright Notice can be found in the Image Gallery section of this web site.
The Hyperstar III only data from last weekend without the lower resolution Sky 90 (Cone nebula) data added. I now really want to get some frames off the top to see more of that fascinating dark nebulosity 🙂
Simon Perkin shows the recent IC2169 image taken at the New Forest Observatory on his weather slot on ITV’s Meridian Weather. See the video footage here. Video is Copyright Meridian News & Weather.
With the recent glut of images due to the perfect conditions these last two evenings I have now surpassed 200 deep-sky images acquired at the New Forest Observatory since winter 2004 🙂 Champers time methinks.
We had two perfect imaging evenings on Sat 18th Feb and Sunday 19th Feb – utterly superb. I took M101 data on both nights, 3 hours of 5-minute subs the first night and 2 hours of 10-minute subs the second night. For the earlier part of both evenings I imaged the IC2169 region in Monoceros. First night was 3 hours of 10-minute subs on IC2169 itself, second night was 3 hours of 5-minute subs on the frame to the left (which captured Trumpler 5). Reason for the second frame was to link IC2169 to some earlier Cone nebula data. So here we have the results of two fantastic evenings’ worth of imaging 🙂
This is the full frame of Hyperstar III data taken last night (the 2010 dataset is not included).
