New Forest Observatory ®

It was a clear night last night (although the seeing was very poor) and it allowed me to iron out the last few bugs that were plaguing me with the mini-WASP array.  Only got some short exposure times, but now that everything seems to be working I can now start concentrating on getting good data from deep-sky objects.  This image of the California nebula is only 9 subs at 10-minutes per sub, so a measly hour and a half when I normally take around 8-hours of data for a Sky 90 with an APS sized one-shot colour CCD.  Still – an hour and a half shows the potential of the mini-WASP array, and gives a good idea of what we might expect with a full 8-hours on the object.

Once I am happy at letting the mini-WASP run itself (auto dome rotator and camera synch software running) then I will get the C11/Hyperstar III up and running to really up the anti on getting the data down in short order.  As per usual – all I need now is for the weather to start cooperating!

The final single star image from last night, 16 subs at 5-minutes per sub using the M26C/Sky90 on Pollox, Castor’s twin.  A bit of colour in Pollux (unlike Castor) so I went for this one first.

Another one from last night – this time Polaris using 19 subs at 5-minutes per sub on the M26C/Sky 90.  A few faint fuzzies in the background, but annoyingly just missed Polarissima Borealis.  North is up and note that we are now in portrait mode.  Why is that?  Well you know I am no fan of this GEM and this just makes things even worse.  If I image in the South, the stupid mount is cantilevered right over and the cameras point at the sky in Landscape mode.  Image to the North and the mount axis is straight up down (or almost) and the cameras now point at the sky in portrait mode.  Now what the hell is the use of that?  With my alt-az on a wedge if I set the camera up in Portrait (or Landscape) mode, that’s how it was set no matter where it pointed in the sky – as it should be.  I dunno, variable Portrait/Landscape modes, Meridian flips, what a load of rubbish!!

After the most abysmal day and plenty of rain it cleared to give the most beautiful evening of the year so far for imaging.  I wanted to make the most of the good imaging conditions so went for quantity rather than quality and decided on doing a bunch of single star shots.  Here is the first one – Bellatrix (top right hand corner) in Orion.

Here is a two-camera two-scope mini-WASP image taken a few nights ago.  It is fairly poor overall mainly because this was only 4 sub-exposures (they were however 1,000 second subs).  I can make a vast improvement to this image with more imaging time, but the main thing is that the image gives me a good idea of my new FOV using the mini-WASP array.  I have always been a little cheesed off with the earlier image I took of this region with the M25C and Sky 90 (RGB plus H-alpha data, and quite a few hours of it!) as it didn’t quite get both nebulae in the FOV with the framing I chose (I should have rotated the camera a touch).  As you can see, the two camera (M26C) two scope (Sky 90) mini-WASP FOV more than adequately covers the region 🙂  So, we wait for the next clear evening and try again.