New Forest Observatory ®

Well I have on my calendar that Picture of the Week for today was Altair and Barnard’s “E”. So it was a bit of a surprise to come to the site today and find nothing has been updated. No idea what happened there :}

Never mind, day after my BIG Birthday I pulled myself together and put the image up.

This is a 2-frame mosaic using the Canon 200mm prime lenses and the ASI 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras. 5 hours of 10-minute subs per frame. Alshain (very light-orange star bottom left), Altair (blue-white star centre), Tarazed (orange star top right, next to Barnard’s “E”) are the 3 stars you can see visually when you look towards Altair. Barnard’s “E” is the very nice dark nebula on the right of Tarazed. I also took this image using the M26C OSC CCDs and the current image definitely benefits from the lower noise CMOS cameras.

Our Picture of the Week is the famous Perseus Double-Cluster which hangs like a pair of charms from the ring of stars I call “Greg’s Charm Bracelet”. At the top is beautiful open cluster Stock 2 which looks like a stick-man lying on his side. This is a 2-frame mosaic taken on the Sky90 array with each frame comprising 4-hours of 10-minute subs.

I am particularly happy in the way the star colour turned out in this image, which almost certainly means this is a Noel Carboni processed image.

Picture of the Week for this week is the Crescent nebula region.

Picture of the Week this time is the whole of the Veil nebula in Cygnus. Why is this one a landmark image for the New Forest Observatory? Well this is a composite of ALL the data I have collected on the Veil nebula over many years. So this image includes Hyperstar, Sky90, and 200mm lens (with Optolong L-Enhance filter) data – all combined, using Registar, to give this final result. From my current location I don’t think adding more data (of less than 10s of hours duration) is going to improve this one radically – I am therefore well into the region of diminishing returns. That being the case I can say that for me at least, in this location, the Veil nebula is now well and truly “done”.

The Picture of the Week this time is the very busy Sadr region of Cygnus. This image was captured with the Canon 200mm prime lenses and the ASI 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras. I had originally taken something like 3 and a half hours of UV/IR cut filtered data and I must admit the result was pretty unimpressive. I subsequently got 4-hours of Optolong L-Enhance filtered data and that really brought all the H-alpha out! However, the Optolong filter lets through H-alpha and OIII and the little blue nebula top centre (NGC6914) is a reflection (broadband blue) nebula, so the Optolong filter cut out most of the blue in this spectacular little nebula (I call NGC6914 a little patch of blue in an ocean of red). However, adding in the UV/IR cut filtered data, plus some stand alone NGC6914 data taken on the Sky90 array with the M26C OSC CCDs, I was able to bring back some of the missing blue in NGC6914.

So what do we see in this image? Dead centre is bright star Sadr which is sitting within the Butterfly nebula. Top just left of centre is the blue reflection nebula NGC6914. Lower right of Sadr is the Crescent nebula, and below Sadr on the same level as the Crescent nebula is the open cluster of stars M29. How M29 (the Cooling Tower) could ever be mistaken for a comet I’ll never know. The bright nebula lower left I did identify at some point in the past, but today I’ve forgotten what it is designated. If anyone out there knows please give an answer in the comments.

I added Sky90 data of M44 to the 2-frame 200mm data of the “Stargate” containing M44 to create this composite image. The nearby Carbon stars X Cancri and T Cancri have been annotated. Cameras used M26C OSC CCDs.

This week we feature Polaris, the North star, together with the surrounding Integrated Flux Nebula (IFN).

This is really seat of the pants imaging to get this one. Why? Because as we are imaging so close to the Pole we cannot autoguide! We are relying totally on how good our Polar alignment is for how long we can take a sub-exposure. We also cannot dither subs – so this is really basic imaging.

For this particular image I used the Sky90 array and 36 x 5-minute sub-exposures.