New Forest Observatory ®

Last night I PEC trained the Celestron Nexstar 11 GPS (wedge mounted altazimuth) mount for the first time.  The Celestron software made a 5-average learning run very easy to carry out.  Since a worm-gear rotation is around 8-minutes this exercise took around 40-minutes to complete.  I did a bit of imaging before the clouds rolled in with the PEC program running, and to be honest I couldn’t see much of an improvement in the tracking.  Continue reading →

The Robofocus kit arrived beautifully packed first thing this morning!!!  How’s that for a highly efficient company then!!  To put it in perspective – the power adapter I ordered from Maplin at the same time – you’ve guessed it – hasn’t arrived.  I get told AFTER placing the order that they don’t have it in stock.  Fortunately the Celestron Nexstar 11 GPS 12 volt adapter is suitable and is running the Robofocus right now 🙂

I have just ordered a RoboFocus from Jerry Smith at Domepage [States] and believe it or not it has already been packed and shipped – same day!  How efficient is that.  The Robofocus is for automatically focusing the Sky 90 using Maxim DL and Larry Weber/Steve Brady’s FocusMax [freeware] software.  It doesn’t look like a trivial exercise to set this all up, so when I’ve eventually found out how to do it, I will write an article on the subject.

At the same time I downloaded PoleAlignMax – so I might also get improved Polar alignment on my setup.

For American/Canadian visitors to this site, please note you can now purchase my book through Starizona

You may not have seen an earlier piece of stunning imagery from Noel – concerning the Moon yet again 🙂  The attached image is a large, high-resolution mosaic of the Moon taken and processed by Noel.  He has pushed up the saturation in the processing to give this most unique colour image.

And here’s one Noel took a little earlier in the evening.  This is one of the most 3D-looking images of our Moon I’ve seen!

The New Forest Observatory was clouded out on the night of the total eclipse of the Moon, but Noel Carboni in Florida had better skies!  He also had a more reasonable hour to work since he is 5 hours behind U.K. time – so what would have been a very unsociable 3.00 a.m. imaging excursion for me was a rather more pleasant 10.00 p.m. outing for Noel.  The attached image of the full eclipse under Florida skies shows Noel’s astronomical skills include imaging as well as processing 🙂  Nice one Noel!

There is a nice review of “Making Beautiful Deep-Sky Images” by our very own Terry Platt [the CEO of Starlight Xpress] on Amazon – thank you Terry, glad you liked the book.  For bigger, better (and more) deep-sky images you’ll have to wait for the mega Parker-Carboni coffee-table book “Star Vistas” due to go on sale for the Christmas market this year.  Noel will have all the images honed to perfection and camera-ready for the publishers by mid-March 2008.  We haven’t signed the final contracts yet, but the second we do you’ll be the first to know who we’ve signed up with.  This is getting exciting now 🙂