Simon Parkin showed the New Forest Observatory “37” cluster image on his Meridian Weather slot last night. The 37 cluster is an amazing asterism in the constellation Orion which is now crossing our southern horizon during the evening. Thank you Simon for once again choosing an NFO image for your weather slot 🙂
Copyright Meridian News & Weather.
Our imaging object for this month was discovered as recently as 1980 – yes you read that correctly – this cascade of stars was first listed by Lucian J Kemble in 1980! Living in Alberta, Canada, Kemble came across this cascade of stars whilst observing in Camelopardalis with a pair of 7 x 50 binoculars. Kemble wrote about his discovery to Walter Scott Houston at the Sky & Telescope magazine and Houston wrote about the discovery and named it Kemble’s Cascade – the name stuck. There is an added bonus with Kemble’s Cascade, at the end of this string of stars is a beautiful little open cluster – NGC 1502 – which greatly adds to the “sparkle” of images taken in this region. Kemble’s Cascade is BIG – you need a short focal length imager to get the whole thing in the field of view – I struggled to get the whole asterism in the Sky 90 diagonal where the FOV is 3.33 x 2.22 degrees – so the Cascade plus the cluster extends to over 3 degrees, which is pretty big.
Usual formula for star pictures, shortish subs, around 3-4 minutes at f#3.5 and as many of them as you can get. For a smooth image you need at least 50 subs so we are talking about a total exposure time around 3 and a half to 4 hours, which is typical for a bright deep-sky object.
So there you have it, a deep-sky asterism discovered and named as late as 1980 – it shows you what can be done! At this point I would like to put in my claim in for Greg’s Charm Bracelet. Greg’s Charm Bracelet is a huge loop of stars that has the Double-Cluster hanging like a sparkly charm from the South East end of the bracelet. What is strange about the bracelet (and this probably goes for Kemble’s Cascade as well) is that it leaps out at you in either binoculars or a low magnification telescope – but you can hardly make it out on star maps or planetarium programs. I am not sure why the eye-brain combination makes the stars in the bracelet stand out so strongly when clearly they aren’t all that much brighter than many of the surrounding stars. Anyway – enough of Charm Bracelet’s – Kemble’s Cascade is the imaging object for this month, and the image below got Noel and me an APOD as well, so the NASA guys like this object too.
Until March 2011 – clear skies to you all!
Simon Parkin used a New Forest Observatory image of the Orion nebula on last night’s Meridian Weather programme. As you will know, Orion is crossing the southern horizon now and is due south around 9:00 p.m. It won’t be too long before it has disappeared into the West for another year – and I haven’t had much chance of imaging in this region this year due to the atrocious weather 🙁 Lucky we U.K. deep-sky imagers have almost infinite patience!
Video footage Copyright Meridian News & Weather.
Yet another day of rain. Ye Gods – will this ever end? I have a horrible feeling that Lovelock has got it spot on.
It shows how bad the weather is, and has been, I am reduced to looking at number theory 🙂 I am not a Mathematician by any stretch of the imagination, so my basic question may already be well known, but I’ve come across an interesting problem when looking at infinity (I think lots of people have come across interesting problems when looking at infinity, including a good few who have gone bonkers while doing so – I think I can see why).
There is a beautiful simple little proof that shows that any number that has a repeating decimal sequence – NO MATTER HOW LONG THE REPEAT SEQUENCE – is a rational! This immediately begs the question: “Is there any such thing as an irrational number?” This depends entirely on the following: “Is there any proof that the irrationals do not repeat at infinity?” There is of course the proof that irrationals (such as the square root of two) cannot be expressed as a rational fraction, so the rational fraction will be infinitely long. Question is having got to the “end” of our infinitely long fraction, does it repeat?
Don’t think about this too much – it didn’t do people like Cantor much good 🙂
Update: I have just been told by a famous Mathematician that “repeat at infinity” is meaningless. Well that’s one good way out of the problem I guess 🙂
The beginning of this year has seen a rush on the specialist DSLR courses we offer (I have no idea why) and unfortunately there are no spaces available now until June 2011. Please check out the range of courses offered on the main menu bar at the top of this page – and if the course you’d like to attend is not listed, then please E-mail me at greg@newforestobservatory.com with your requirements, customised courses are our speciality 🙂
Around mid day today this guy came wandering down the street as bold as brass. Saw him through the study double-glazing, and fortunately he stopped off in the neighbour’s garden to grab a bite to eat. This gave me enough time to get the camera off the desk, remove the lens cap and snap off 4 frames before he disappeared. What’s very strange is that the same thing happened around this time last year as well – spooky 🙂
Here is my son’s old TV monitor together with the 4 x 24″ Prolite E2407HDS IIYAMA monitors that are the heart of the New Forest Observatory control room.
Happy New Year to you all – and what a way to start the New Year!! Just got back from the morning dog walk and snapped off a few frames of this bird about half a mile away. Sorry the picture isn’t too good but it was hand held with the 400mm zoom and a fairly slow shutter speed as it’s a dismal morning. Can you see what it is? Only a male Hen Harrier – that’s all – mega! What a great way to start the New Year 🙂
Happy New Year to you all – I hope the hangover from last night’s celebrations isn’t too bad 🙂
The imaging object for this month is one of the most famous supernova remnants, and the first entry in Messier’s catalogue – it is M1, the Crab nebula in the constellation Taurus. This tiny object, only measuring 6′ x 4′ (that is arcminutes note, 1/60th of a degree) is also labelled as NGC 1952 and lies around 6,500 light years away. Firstly, being so small, you really do need a longish focal length to do this object justice. My 400 – 500mm using either the Sky 90 or the Hyperstar III is simply too short. It has amazing colour and detail and would do well with narrowband imaging – the incredible Hubble image of this object is I believe one of the highest resolution images taken of any deep-sky object – and it shows! Although we cannot possibly compete with Hubble on this one, we can get as many narrowband subs as we can at high sampling (I would suggest you sample at around your local seeing limit). You can see from my image below that you can still get quite some impressive detail even with short focal length imagers, and you have the added bonus of seeing the Crab in context – a lonely object in a fairly barren region of space.
So we start the New Year with an astronomical bang 🙂 The last few months of 2010 were amongst the worst (weather-wise) that I have known at the New Forest Observatory – let’s hope we get some better luck at the beginning of this New Year.
Until February – clear skies to you all!
