Novatech came up to scratch with a new superb product – a 4-monitor support system that will take up to 24″ monitors – I have IIYAMA Prolite E2407HDS 24″ monitors, and as you can see on this video, the stand takes them with ease 🙂
Why do you have 4-monitors on your desk? Cos I can’t see the star map behind them at all if I have 6 🙂
The idea is that eventually each monitor will show the image from the 4-cameras that will make up the full mini-WASP array.
As you will know we had a rare beautifully clear Moonless night last night – time for some serious imaging! I had planned to grab IC1831, a ball of stars very close to the Heart nebula, quite some while back. 10-minute subs and 6 hours total exposure time – what more do you want? Well – camera problems (I haven’t got a clue what’s wrong with it yet, but it behaves as if there’s water vapour in the cell – but there isn’t – and it’s intermittent as well!) meant that I only got 18 subs (3-hours) out of the 36 that were useful – incredibly frustrating. Also – I’m not that overwhelmed by IC1831 itself. If you look this up on “The Sky 6” you see this incredible ball of stars just sitting off the Heart nebula. Well I guess the ball of stars is there – but it is less impressive than some of the deep images I’ve taken in the Milky Way region of Cassiopeia (near CTB1). So a mixed night of highs, lows and general indifference – not good for 6 hours of quality imaging time 🙁
Well – it’s been a very long wait for a clear sky – but tonight in Brockenhurst I’ve struck lucky with the weather. Absolutely freezing outside, but crystal clear dark (Moonless) sky outside and managed to get started imaging at 5:45 p.m. – very happy 🙂 I’m using “the Sky 6” to point the C11 and it seems to work pretty well. Object for tonight – a compact ball of stars lying very close to the Heart nebula labelled IC1831. 10-minute subs at f#3.5 and I’ll keep going until the object moves out of view or it clouds/fogs over. It’s been a long wait, but at least it’s been a fine night to kick off again with the imaging.
I just purchased a piece of stitching software – PTGui Pro – for putting together big mosaics (Gigapixel images) of terrestrial scenes. It did a pretty good job of a snow-scene this morning (although the blending wasn’t too good) so I thought I’d try it out on a 4-frame mosaic of the Gamma Cass region. It not only did a very good job, it also did a better job on blending the data! It will be interesting to see what it makes of photomicrography data – I’ll see if I can give that a go tomorrow. For now – take a look at a wide field of Gamma Cass, 4-frames put together using PTGui Pro.
Louey the black Labrador uses the observatory as the turn around point in his blistering circuit of the garden in this video.
First snow of the year here in Brockenhurst – even we didn’t get away with it this time (we quite often do). Taken with a fish-eye lens on the Canon 5D MkII at 8:00 a.m. this morning.
I always have a lot of trouble with my imaging at this time of year as there are so many great objects up there to be grabbed and I can only concentrate on one at a time. Auriga is in competition with Orion for my attention every winter as Auriga is also teeming with lots of goodies to image. Although Cassiopeia is chock-a-block with open clusters – Auriga comes in at a pretty close second as far as I’m concerned. This December’s Imaging Object of the Month is the beautiful open cluster M38 in Auriga. It is pretty large with a diameter of 15 arc minutes and shines away at magnitude 6.4. M38 lies at a distance of 4,200 light years (so it is pretty close) and it makes a great capture in a longish focal length instrument where you can nicely frame the region.
M36, M37 and M38 are all open clusters lying quite close to one another in Auriga and it is well worth bagging the lot if you get enough clear skies.
As per usual the formula for imaging this one is a resonable focal length, 3 to 5-minute subs, and as many as you can get. In the “old” Hyperstar days I often took 100 subs of an object as my sub-exposure time was typically just one minute. Although the images did not have great depth, they were glassy smooth, and were perfect for clusters and single bright star images.
Well – the next Imaging Object of the Month will be in a New Year. So, Happy New Year to you all and let the long dark imaging nights continue – for just a little bit longer 🙂
O.K. so it wasn’t quite the last post for a while 🙂 I just found how to get higher resolution (PlotPoints) working in ParametricPlot3D – now I’m happy!
