Nice bright sunny morning on this first day of the New Year – and this guy was out enjoying the weak winter rays:
Not sure why the image of the month hasn’t popped up this morning – we are looking into it. Happy New Year to you all, and let’s hope for some better imaging weather this year!!!
First of all Happy New Year to you all! I won’t say let’s hope for better imaging weather this coming year as so far it hasn’t been anything to write home about. Moving on. This month’s Imaging Object of the Month is the beautiful Jellyfish nebula in Gemini. This is a very difficult time of the year for imagers as there is so much up there in a good imaging position right now, including all the stuff in Auriga and of course Orion and Monoceros. IC443 is pretty faint and does well with the addition of narrowband data to the RGB, especially H-alpha and S-II. IC443 is also BIG – you can see from the accompanying image that the rather large FOV of the Sky 90/M25C combination (2.22 x 3.33 degrees) is just about perfect for the region.
This image took a LOT of work. This is 3 hours of RGB, 9 hours and 40-minutes of H-alpha, and 3 hours and 40-minutes of SII giving a total exposure time of 16 hours and 20-minutes – and it could have easily done with the same again!! So the message is, lots of time, add narrowband – and perhaps make this your winter mega-project if you can manage to keep away from Orion 🙂
Clear skies until February!
I have just purchased some incredibly powerful registration software called Registar. I played with the free download version for a few days before deciding I couldn’t live without this one and bought it today 🙂 It is really useful to put together mosaics I have been working on for a couple of years – to see where I have gaps missing, but that’s the easy stuff. Registar will overlay frames obtained from different imaging systems so I can put Hyperstar I/H9C data together with Sky 90/M25C data together with Hyperstar III/M25C data – extremely powerful software indeed!!! I am going to have great fun with this over the next few days.
Here is a short clip from the Meridian weather forecast from December 28th 2009.
Copyright Meridian TV.
I believe that the Cone nebula and Christmas Tree cluster will feature on tonight’s Meridian weather. Keep an eye out around 6:45 p.m. 🙂
Yesterday, following publication of our Gamma Cass and friends image on Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) – the New Forest Observatory (NFO) site got 4,341 visits!! Usual daily visit rate is around 150. Such is the power of APOD 🙂
Happy Birthday Noel!!!
Looking forward to even more great collaborative images for 2010 🙂 Hopefully by the summer we’ll be working on data from the mini-WASP array – that’ll set the cat amongst the pigeons 🙂
The surge of hits from our recent APOD has now pushed the number of hits on our site to over 110,000!! Great way to be ending 2009 🙂
A couple of hours later and we’re now over 111,000 hits 🙂 🙂
And to follow on from yesterday’s EPOD, Noel & I managed to get today’s APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day). This time it’s the Gamma Cassiopeia nebulosity and Gamma Cas itself in a wide field image taken using the C11/Hyperstar III/SXVF-M25C combination. A rather nice Christmas Eve present for 2009 – thank you Rob & Jerry 🙂
Great news! Noel & I managed to get today’s EPOD with a festive Christmas Tree cluster and cone nebula shot (EPOD have the picture upside down at the moment – but I’ve told Jim so it might turn up the right way later on today). Thank you Jim for continuing to show our work to your huge audience 🙂
Managed to get 4-hours of imaging on little NGC1333 in Perseus last night in sub-zero conditions. I think there was some high lying mist/fog but hopefully the image turned out o.k.
