New Forest Observatory ®

This is a Hyperstar III 4-framer of the Caph region in Cassiopeia.  Each frame is a 1-hour exposure (40 x 90-seconds) at f#2.  I had no idea there was so much dust in the region, this area is in the Milky Way, yet you can see vast areas where the stars seem to be missing due to the intervening dust clouds.  Also in this image are vdB1 and HH161 at around the 7 O’clock position from Caph (thank you Anna for identifying these for me) and towards the middle/left is dwarf irregular galaxy IC10.  Top right there is a piece of emission nebula that I have just caught – not sure what this one is yet either.  Plenty going on in this 4.26 x 2.80 degree image 🙂

I took 78 x 4-minute subs of comet Lulin on 28th February 2009 and created a deep-sky image of the object back then.  But it has taken me until 10th February 2012 to edit all the individual subs into a short animation 🙂  Here you see comet Lulin moving through Leo and passing in front of a bunch of Leo galaxies towards the end of the animation.  Enjoy 🙂

You Tube animation:

Here we have the Fireworks galaxy, Arp29, Caldwell 12, NGC6946 – and the open cluster NGC6939 lying close by (in the image, not by distance) in the constellation Cepheus.  This is recently processed data from 20th August 2009 taken with the Hyperstar III and is 23 subs at 5-minutes per sub – could obviously do with quite a lot more exposure time for the galaxy, and some dithered imaging would have helped a lot with the quality as well.  Maybe next time 🙂

Hyperstar III data taken on 30th May 2009 – 20 subs at 5-minutes per sub, f#2, 11″ SCT.