Noel has just completed processing the 3rd frame in the Markarian Chain mosaic.
This frame will be added to the previous 2-frames to give a panoramic view of the region containing not only the whole of Markarian’s Chain, but also a fair few Messier galaxies as well.
Noel is plugging away at old data in every spare minute he has whilst working on a big software project. He has created this superb image of the Cave nebula in Cepheus taken with the Sky 90/M25C combination. This image is a total exposure time of 16.6 hours using RGB and H-alpha data.
After a minor glitch that was quickly sorted out by Dean of Starizona (thank you Dean! and moral of the story – DO NOT attempt anything even remotely complicated if you’re suffering from jet-lag!!!) the Hyperstar, M25C and 2″ Hutech IDAS LP filter are all fitted to the C11. Forgot to mention in the last post yet another bonus for the new V3 Hyperstar for the C11, it can accommodate a standard 2″ filter! This is REALLY useful and will open up a whole new world for narrowband imaging with a big, high resolution monochrome camera.
Well – it is now likely to rain for the next 6 months of course, but the second I see a clear patch of night sky it will be first light for the new Hyperstar 🙂
Good news! Our OIII-enhanced version of the Rosette nebula [RGB, OIII, H-alpha] image made today’s EPOD 🙂
I have just returned from a business trip to Arizona, and Arizona can only mean one thing for astro-imagers – Starizona!! Whilst staying in Phoenix, Dean of Starizona shipped me the latest (adjustable!) Hyperstar for the C11 and an electonic microfocuser for the Feathertouch focuser (also supplied by Starizona). Thank you Dean! Sorry I didn’t have time to meet up, maybe next visit, hopefully not during one of your summers (I didn’t see a daytime temperature below 100F and it hit 118F on one day – unbelievable!). Continue reading
On pages 72-73 of the July issue of Astronomy Now you can read all the gory details of how the whole of the Veil Nebula was captured in a 32-hour imaging (and processing) marathon.
I took a look at one of the old computers and rediscovered a couple of lost and forgotten websites. Please check out some images of the 2003 transit of Mercury and the 2004 transit of Venus. The images on these sites may be the last I have as I have suffered a few complete losses on the computer since those times and I wasn’t into data backup in the early days 🙁 Nowadays I have a Terabyte of network storage and a DVD burning routine for important imaging data.
Noel has just completed processing a widefield image of the region in which the quasar APM08279+5255 resides. The image is composed of 28 sub-exposures using an exposure time of 6-minutes per sub. This object used to hold the record as the most distant object ever imaged [it was in the Guinness book of Records] at nearly 13 billion light years.
There is no imaging object of the month for June!
Looking back over the years I see that it is not only far too late before it is dark enough to start imaging, but also that it gets light far too early in the morning as well. At best there are only 3-4 hours maximum of imaging time, and even then the sky doesn’t get really dark, so the quality of your images obtained during this month won’t match those acquired at other times of the year. Continue reading
I was very disappointed to note that Noel Carboni was not credited with all the digital image processing in the text accompanying the Rosette nebula image in the June 2008 issue of Practical Astronomer. I have asked Eddie to rectify this oversight as an erratum in next month’s [July] issue of Practical Astronomer.
