Altair.

Having repositioned the guidescope further foward to allow easier connectability for the Canon. A complete rebalance was required after realligning the scopes. Altair was bright in the east and a suitable candidate for practicing on. Guidescope in perfect sync to the canon so I ran a test of 2 each of one two five and ten minute exposures at ISO 800. The ten minute was very bright and I did think that it would be unusable but no it stacked along with the others to produce a 36 minute guided image of  α Aquilae our 12th closest star to us Altair at 16.7 light years it is one of the closest stars to be directly imaged. Altair is an A type main sequece star that's nearly double our suns size but an increase in luminosity of approx 11 times.
Altair possesses an extremely rapid rate of rotation; it has a rotational period of
approximately 9 hours. For comparison, the equator of the sun requires just over 25 days for a complete rotation. This rapid rotation forces Altair to be oblate, its equatorial
diameter is over 20 percent greater than its polar diameter. Below image

 False-color image of the rapidly rotating star Altair, made with the MIRC imager on the CHARA array on Mt. Wilson

Image from Wikipedia

IC 5070 The pelican

Just off the ease coast of florida in NGC7000 The North American Nebula lies the strange, wierd, call it what you will, Pelican Nebula. Good job there is no flamingo nebula (I have a thing about flamingos dont even ask)
Located in the same arm our ouf galaxy (Orion arm) approx 2000 light years away, A flood of ultraviolet radiation is being released from massive stars hidden behind the thick dust permeating the region. The intense radiation is wrecking having on the local environment. The radiation ionizes parts of the molecular cloud while eroding and evaporating other areas within the cloud. Portions of the molecular cloud consisting of higher density matter resist ionization and survive as long pillars of dust and gas thus creating the shape we see today.

This is a somewhat adhoc shot. The wind was a tad furious around the dome but it was at least clear. I had set the Iso to 3200 to see what I could pick up for another imaging run when I caught a glimpse of the Pelican. I set up for 30 x 2minute exposures and went back inside the house. I never expected a great deal because of the wind. Having binned 10 shots I processed the remainder. I small DDP stretch and a pretty star spike later, no darks,flats ect gave me this image. If you remember last year I took a shot of the North American in both UHC filtered and unfiltered and what a dramatic difference. http://www.malcsastro.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/ngc-7000-with-uhc-filter.html My intention is to do the same again. WATCH THIS SPACE.

Cocoon Nebula Wide Field

Having spent a night last week imaging some delight from the south. Upon processing the smallest stars appeared as donut shaped. My focus was off my 100th of a mm test images looked ok but it wasn't until they were stacked and processed you could see there was a problem. So last night was really just a test to try and put in place a good focussing technique. I started with π2cyg a 4.4 mag star less than 3° from my target. I use my bahtinov mask to achieve a near perfect focus. I then switch to Imagesplus and fine tune using the FWHM process. Overall I was pretty happy with what was done. Time was now gone 1.00am and work loomed for the next day. So I ran a 30 x 1 minute exposure at Iso1600. Deleted 2 subs and stacked a series of 28 frames to give me this shot. High in the North east under a very poor sky. I will endeavour to have another go later this year when positioned in the west and a good dark sky.

The Eagle Rises

A short window of opportunity arises for some of our galaxies southern belles.
As wonderful my new site is I still have a restricted view of the south and thus
only a small time frame in which to capture any of the wonders here.I could not
even see antares from my previous location. So as you can imagine was quite frustrating
during the summer months. Due south for me now still lies above the town of Watton 3 miles away, sky glow is not too bad along with a never truly dark sky I have been careful in setting the right exposure. 26 minutes was all I could capture for this beauty. Having never imaged M16 before I was delighted to capture some of the ha I knew I couldnt push any harder as the test images were almost washed out. So here it is The pillars of creation set against a myriad of diamonds.

Lunar Mosaic

This is my first attempt of a lunar mosaic imaging with the 90mm refractor. Using the prevoiusly mentioned DSLR avi capture programme. Thursday evening saw an hour or so of clear skies just before the low moon drifted behind the roof of the house. Using the amazing live view zoom mode I am capturing HD avi movies and utilising registax 6 to process and stack. I used the same wavelet setting on each of the 5 images. A few pixels were removed from the sides to remove unwanted artifacts and colour fringing from the stack.

camera was set to Iso 800 and 1/60th sec exposure.

I think it came out alright.