Soul nebula

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Greg Parker

Nice clear Moonless night last night – up until midnight that is when in rolled the high cloud and imaging ended.  Got just over 3 hours on the Soul nebula IC1848 in Cassiopeia.  Looking at the data I probably need another 4 hours or so on this one for a quality image – that’s the Sky 90 lack of speed for you 🙁

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Thank you everyone for a great send-off!

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Greg Parker

I had a thoroughly good time at my pushing-off party at the University of Southampton last night and would like to thank everyone involved for such a pleasant evening – I really enjoyed it (and I usually don’t like parties 🙂

Very pleased and grateful for the signed cards, the flowers (for the missus :), the laser scribed Silicon wafer, and the substantial book token which was considerably in excess of the quid I was fully expecting.

It has obviously been a great place for me to work these last 20-odd years, because as I have mentioned before, in any “normal” job I would not have stayed put for a tenth of that time – so thank you friends and colleagues for creating a very intellectually stimulating environment that could hold my ADHC in check for such a long time – that has really been quite an unbelievable achievement, believe me!

As you all go forward I wish you the very best under these most difficult financial circumstances – and do remember one of my little ditties – “There is ALWAYS light at the end of the tunnel – might just be a bloody long tunnel is all”. 🙂

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Momentous Day!! I’m Free!!

Posted on October 1, 2010 by Greg Parker

Today is the first day of a new life for me 🙂

After 23 years 5 months and 4 days [yes actually, I was counting] I have now officially retired (early) from the University of Southampton.

Feel like the veritable pig in clover 🙂

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IOM October 2010 – Messier 15 the Great Pegasus Cluster

Posted on October 1, 2010 by Greg Parker

This month’s imaging object is M15 [NGC7078] the Great Pegasus Cluster, a very nice Globular Cluser in the constellation Pegasus.  This is a large globular with a diameter of 18 arc minutes (M13 is 21 arc minutes) and lies at a distance of 31,000 light years.  As it is a fairly small object you do better with longer focal lengths for this one and as is usual for globulars keep the sub-exposure time down a bit so that you can resolve the core stars.  M15 contains some hidden secrets!  One of these is Pease 1, a 14th magnitude planetary nebula on its north-eastern side.  M15 also contains a large number of variable stars – nearly 100 have been logged so far.  It was discovered in 1974 that M15 was a source of X-rays, these are believed to emanate from supernova remnants.  So, for a decent image of M15 you want a reasonable focal length for an appropriate image scale, shortish subs of maybe 3-minutes duration depending on your f#, and finally, as usual, as many subs as you can get for a nice smooth finish 🙂

We are well and truly into winter imaging evenings now with long dark nights – let’s just hope we get a few clear Moonless ones as well.

Until November’s IOM – clear skies and happy imaging.

m15_noel_nfo
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A short HD video of the New Forest Observatory control centre

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Greg Parker

Here you can find a short Video clip of the triple screen system at the NFO control centre.  This video was taken on the Canon 5D MkII DSLR camera using a 14mm fish eye lens.  The movie clip was uploaded on to my Flickr site and you can see the result by clicking on the word “Video” in the first sentence.  This is just under a minute’s worth of HD video and took up something like 305Mb which as you can imagine took a little while to load up on Flickr.  Still – it looks like a promising way to upload home made video files to the NFO site when you don’t have a dedicated camcorder.

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Stop Press!! Stop Press!! Astrofest March 2011 Tenerife

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Greg Parker

Details to follow!!!

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Whisky tasting at Farthings 17th September 2010

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Greg Parker

Sir Patrick had a Whisky tasting event he hosted at Farthings on 17th September 2010 and we were educated in all things distilled by Dr. Andrew M. Forrester who is the Balvenie Ambassador U.K.  Some rather fine Whiskies were sampled over the course of 3 hours and we were given the background on how they were made – fascinating stuff.  Must admit the highlight of the evening for me was when the very special bottle was opened at the end – now those of you that know me know that I’m not into drink at all – but that stuff was pretty amazing 🙂  I’m not saying how much per bottle, but you could get a couple of 2″ narrowband filters for about the same price.

patrick_andrew_forum
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Star Vistas – the Exhibition – the Photo Gallery, Bristol

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Greg Parker

After a very succesful Exhibition of the Star Vistas images at the ArtSway gallery – Star Vistas will now be showing at the Photo Gallery in Bristol from October 23rd until November 3rd 2010.  There will be a Preview and Talk on Friday October 22nd from 6:30 p.m. until 9:00 p.m.  If you missed the ArtSway Exhibition and you’re in the South West – drop in to see the Star Vistas images at the Photo Gallery 🙂

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High speed flash image on Meridian News & Weather last night

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Greg Parker

One of my high speed flash images appeared last night on Meridian TV 🙂

Video clip Copyright Meridian TV.

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The largest, highest resolution, deep-sky print to date

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Greg Parker

Noel has just processed our largest deep-sky dataset to-date (there is a larger one waiting to be finished).  This is the Cocoon nebula with the associated  huge dark nebulosity.  The picture below shows a print I just made on the HP Designjet 130 6-colour printer.  You can tell from the filing cabinet that this is a fairly large print 🙂  It actually measures 22.5 x 58 inches and is printed at 200DPI!!  This is the biggest, highest resolution print I have made with the HP printer to date.  This print will be available for sale shortly, but as it took nearly two hours to print out and consumed an outrageous quantity of ink – it won’t be cheap.

cocoon_print_58inch_forum
Posted in Creating mosaics, Hyperstar and SXVF-M25C | 2 Comments