With the 200mm/M26C Trius combo in portrait mode I managed to grab 10 x 4-minutes of the Castor/Pollux region after 3-hours of setting up (focus mainly) in the freezing cold. The chip turned out to be not flat for this image, so the next morning I brought it indoors and flattened it pretty precisely. Now waiting for the next clear night to see how well (or not) I’ve done. Would like to grab a 2-framer of the M44 region if at all possible.
Should have done this one Friday night when the Moon was a little closer to the planets but didn’t manage it. Using the Canon 5D MkII and a 50mm prime lens I managed this shot, ISO100, 10-seconds, f#5.6
This image was shown on Meridian weather at 6:30 p.m. on 23/02/2015
The one-way trip to Mars known as Mars One seems to be unfolding as it fails miserably under close scrutiny. This is a great shame, and potentially a missed opportunity. We should embrace this ground-breaking idea and support it with as much cash as we can spare, and indeed spur the team on to an even greater Mars One expedition! Why? Here we have a chance to create and launch our very own B-ark. We can give a glorious send off to all those middle-men, Politicians, PR Consultants, Lawyers, Solicitors, used-car salesmen and of course the telephone sanitisers, and at the same time push forward the frontiers of Space Science. It’s clearly a win-win situation and we shouldn’t let it slip through our fingers.
Not a lot of colour in M106 itself 🙁 But plenty in the stars 🙂 The Sky 90s always seem to be able to grab star colour very nicely.
24 x 20-minute subs using the mini-WASP array. And yes – that star in the centre was used for focusing and guiding 🙂
The cloud didn’t finally shift until 9:00 p.m. last night – but when it did we were left with a pitch black, clear, Moonless night like I haven’t seen for about a year.
After a couple of stalls where the object I wanted to image was behind trees, I settled down on the M106 region with the mini-WASP array and 20-minute subs. I needed to refocus the refractors after an hour but in the end got 24 x 20-minute high-quality subs which I will enjoy looking at today. Shame I went to bed at 1:30 a.m. as it appears to have stayed clear all night. Need to get more automation sorted out!
Last night I was very disturbed by a one and a half hour documentary on BBC4 about a young man I had never heard of before – Aaron Swartz.
For those of you in the American Government Departments responsible for this young man’s death – and you know exactly who you are – you are the most despicable pieces of filth I’ve ever come across in my lifetime.
If there is a Higher Being out there dishing out Justice – you’ll be getting yours soon!!
Got today’s “EPOD encore” with the frost covered spider webs shot.
Good to see that old one again Jim 🙂
O.K. here’s something I don’t quite understand.
The current Conservative party will hold a referendum on the EU IF they are voted back in. They will also build thousands of new homes IF they are voted back in. They will also send “hit teams” into all our secondary schools to “sort things out” IF they get voted back in. And they have promised a million and one other things they have no intention of carrying out IF they get voted back in.
So why are they hell bent on trying to sell off our forests and get fracking carried out wherever the hell they like BEFORE they (don’t) get voted back in?? Funny that innit (not).
This is a well-known fact, apart from a certain misinformed person (Professor? I somehow doubt it) who felt it necessary to impart his faulty “knowledge” at a talk I gave at the Lymington Yacht club.
For the benefit of the misinformed individual there is an interesting article that can be found here: http://www.nature.com/news/astronomy-laser-focus-1.16741?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20150127 which spells out in detail how adaptive optics gives large ground-based telescopes the edge in resolution over Hubble (as I actually said at the end of my talk but which obviously went straight over the head of said Yachtie). However, to any thinking person it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise should it? The new Extremely Large Telescope (ground-based) will have 16x yes that is SIXTEEN times the resolution of Hubble. But it’s hardly a fair race when you are putting a 39-metre mirror (the ELT) against the piddling little 2.4-metre mirror of Hubble is it? Yes you need the adaptive optics to get the best out of ground-based telescopes, but it is hardly surprising (to most people) that the huge ground-based telescopes can outdo Hubble in terms of resolution.
