I revisited and reprocessed this data to see if I could find any of the nebulosity reported in the Sky 6. There is some, but it is pretty faint throughout the region – you can see the very edge of the Heart nebula bottom right, so the faint stuff is almost certainly part of this. One thing’s for sure – there are a lot of stars!
As you probably know, the Celestron “Heavy Duty” wedge has a fundamental design fault – a large open ended box section which flexes all over the place with a heavy scope like the C11 being cantilevered all over the sky. Up until now I have closed off the box section with some 2.2mm Aluminium sheet – but seeing as there’s been a big build going on (the mini-WASP array) and I have been in a building mood, I thought I’d really beef up the end plate for the Celestron wedge with a chunky 6mm Aluminium plate. Picture left – I don’t think anything will be flexing anytime soon 🙂
Have I gone a bit too far with the new warm room for the mini-WASP?
The beginning of this ISS pass is missing (the bit on the left) – why? Because I was pointing in the wrong part of the sky when the action kicked off and it was only when my son said “it’s behind you” in true Panto fashion that I got onto it and started imaging. Not sure why the path is broken up into little bits in this image – if you know why, do let me know.
The fireworks galaxy NGC6946 and open cluster NGC6939 in the constellation Cepheus. 23 sub-exposures at 5-minutes per sub using the Hyperstar III and M25C one-shot colour camera.
This pair of open clusters has a Milky Way backdrop and they are surrounded by faint emission nebulosity. They can be found in the constellation Cygnus lying just underneath the Crescent nebula region. Image taken 19th August 2009 using the Hyperstar III – 22 sub-exposures at 5-minutes per sub (equivalent to 30-minute subs on the Sky 90).
Well – although it has been pouring with rain ALL day it looks like (on the satellite) there is a clear patch coming over for later tonight. As there is a 6-minute pass (that’s long!) of the ISS at 9:28 p.m. tonight, it would be great if I can get a long exposure shot of this one. Took a video of the ISS as it passed through some cloud gaps last night at ISO6400 on the Canon 5D MkII – didn’t see it 🙁 So if it is clear tonight I’ll do the usual long exposure with the fish eye lens on the Canon 5D MkII and I’ll try the Sony NEX-VG10 with the 12mm wide angle lens for the video and see what happens.
As it was cloudy AND a bright Moon last night it was no good for deep-sky imaging – but as it wasn’t actually raining – and I could see a FEW stars, it was an opportunity to take the AstroTrac and Canon 5D MkII outside for some night time shots. Used the Canon fisheye lens and an exposure time of 3-seconds at ISO 3200 and f#4 for these. This was a bit of experimentation before trying to video the space station passing over using the Canon 5D MkII. If I can see any sky at all tonight, this is what I’ll be trying next 🙂
I have no idea why I took this image of a galaxy group in Bootes on January 29th 2011. I also have no record of it in the logbook. I ran an astrometry check on it to find where it was – the bright star near the middle is magnitude 4.80. Apparently this is 19 sub-exposures at 10-minutes per sub, so for some reason I spent 3 hours of good imaging time on this one – if only I could remember why 🙂
My Algol and Rho Persei image is “Picture of the Week” on the My Astro Space web site – thanks guys 🙂
