More from Dad’s WWI plate photography in the Himalayan foothills, this time we have a wood-collector and his Missus, who seems to be a leaf collector.
The first original sepia print was colourised and cleaned up by Grok, and then the image was animated by Grok who added a sound track complete with the sound of the wood-collectors walking stick hitting the hard dry earth.
Possibly bordering on the politically incorrect, but that’s how it was in those days! This is again a Grok cleaned up and colourised version of one of Dad’s WWI sepia prints, together with the Grok animation.
This time we have the Memsahib on her tea plantation with her son being carted about by one of the locals. The son and the local’s face say it all.
This is another one of Dad’s WWI images from the Himalayan foothills. The first image is the Grok colourised and cleaned up version of the original sepia print showing a wood-collector. The video below the still image was created by Grok which also added the appropriate sound track.
I’ve just been moaning to a good friend about how this hobby is becoming a pointless exercise – especially with the weather – and what do I do? I start a major re-configuration of the MiniWASP array. Why? Because a vital component that I need for the re-configuration has not been available since all the Ukraine trouble – namely the totally brilliant Astromechanics Canon lens controller. It is now available again – YAYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So what am I planning to do? As I have not used the 3 x Sky90 refractors with their M26C OSC CCD cameras in YEARS, I will remove them all from the array and replace them with Canon 200mm prime lenses together with ASI MC2600 Pro (or whatever the latest one is) CMOS cameras. So the North Dome will be for wide-field work ONLY, and the South Dome with the Hyperstar 4 on the Celestron C11 with the 2600MC Pro CMOS camera will be for more close-in work having an f#2 focal length of 560mm. And that my followers will be IT. At 71 years of age I don’t think I have the time for any more major changes at the New Forest Observatory. So keep in touch with developments on here and see how things go. I know from past experience that it will NOT be straightforward, and that there will be a ton of things I haven’t thought through properly. Then again, that’s the fun of this hobby, isn’t it?
P.S. This means of course that if anybody wants to buy a perfectly collimated Sky90 with reducer-corrector and fine focus adjuster, or an M26C OSC CCD then there are 3 on offer for each. Just get in touch by leaving a note below.
This week we feature another deep-sky image. This time it is the Gamma Cass region featuring the beautiful Gamma Cass nebulosity. This is a very deep image taken using the 200mm lenses, the 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras and UV/IR cut filters. You are just beginning to see the full extent of the nebula in this image. To get a better image of the nebula I will need to move over to Optolong L-Enhance narrowband filters and use 20 – 30-minute exposures. Maybe I’ll get this done this year?
Extremely lucky it was clear again last night – BUT – unfortunately there was thin high cloud so this isn’t as good an image as it could have been.
Hyperstar4 and M2600MC Pro 23 subs at 4-minutes per sub, dithered data.
A clear Moonless night last night, so I fired up the Hyperstar. After focusing and running CCDCalc I found I had perfect collimation! I’m not arguing – I just went straight to the best looking bit of sky to give me at least a couple of hours of imaging and got on with it. This is in the M105 region and the central star is SAO 99280. Yes I know I was an idiot and if I’d bother to look at the planetarium program and frame it better I would have got M95 and M96 as well – but you can’t have everything. This image comprises 19 subs at 200-seconds per sub on the Hyperstar4 with UV/IR cut filter and ASI 2600MC Pro CMOS camera running at -5C. It has been MONTHS since I last got an image so I am more than pleased that the kit behaved itself last night.
This week’s POW featured as an EPOD (Earth Science Picture of the Day). Here we see a macrophoto of a Sunflower seed-head on the left, and on the right we see a simulation of the seed-head produced using the Mathcad 2000 mathematical software.
This week we feature a selection of 3D prints from the old (and now retired) ANET A6 which performed superbly for many years.
Back to astronomy this week with an image of the Witch’s Broom nebula in Cygnus. This is not my data but data given to me by a lecturer at Brockenhurst College. He got professional narrowband data – Ha Hb and O3 – from a Tenerife observatory and I assigned Ha to red, O3 to green and Hb to blue to get this image. Hb data is not usually taken professionally as it offers no more useful information than the Ha channel.
