The sky at Night.

I can finally tick off appearing on The sky at night tv programme from my bucket list. I was lucky enough to have my image of the Horsehead nebula appear with myself and Pete Lawrence on the programme. The interview involved 2 pieces to camera with a number of questions asked. Final edit and broadcast was reduced to about 30 seconds. As mentioned before this is the second time the team has visited Breckland AS. An open invite was given to return if we can offer anymore future programmes.

Star trails

Star trails from Saham Hills observatory

 

 

The last time I imaged star trails was with my old Olympus OM1 film camera back in Somerset.

I have seen a few really nice compositions on various Facebook pages using a free programme

http://www.startrails.de/html/software.html .A very simple programme to use. Take the images load into programme and select the trail type and go. In a short while you have a fantastic pic like this.

 

 The sequence is 150 x 40 second images from the Canon 40D and 18-85 IS USM lens @18mm Iso 400.
Capture started at 21.22 hence the deep blue sky. The bright star at bottom right is Vega rising. I am sure I will be posting many more of these before the year is out.



New Life in an old focuser

I tested a replacement focuser for the 110mm unfortunately it doesn't fit due to the 4" fitting on the 110. Having removed the existing I decided to have one more bash at trying to get the darn thing moving. I have the technical diagram for the focuser and decided to adjust the bolts that state should only be adjusted by an engineer. What the heck it's busted so what's the worst I can do. Fix it!!!!!

So 20 minutes later I have a reasonably smooth movement going, readjusted the tension to take the weight of the field flattener and camera. On it went and bingo it worked in both directions. I don't think I want to remove the camera ever again.......

A rebalance of the scopes was required to bring back the Starlight camera back into operation. 
A lovely flat field test has resulted in sharp round stars at the edges of the frame too. I took 40 sky flats and created a decent master. Dark frames also captured for a full calibration. I like to use a median setting in Maxim DL as this gives best removal of hot pixels. 5,10 & 20 minute guided exposures have given me a very smooth finish. Processed in Photoshop. The best image of M13 I have taken has resolved stars to the core. The somewhat forgotten Ngc6207 is showing structure and threre are a few more little galaxies easily visible. A PGC galaxy 3515221 can also just be seen at mag 19.64. This side by side inverted image and CDC chart confirms its location.

An inverted image of the core

Jupiter

Some recent captures under less than average seeing. Using my ZWO ASI120MC camera and the clubs Celestron C9.25 with a 2x Barlow lens. Captured at 11 frames per second approx 90 seconds of recoding to avoid image rotation. The best 50% of frames captured was the result. My best capture of the Great red spot I like the small white disturbance into the south equatorial belt, that defines the red spot nicely. I can also see  some lovely striation detail to the North Belt. I am pleased with it despite the seeing, but not as happy as I would like when seeing some of the other jupiter images posted on Facebook groups. I will of course endeavour to get a little more each capture and produce an image worthy of publicaion.

I am very happy with this image capture of Jupiter and Ganymede. A steadier atmosphere gave a small improvement to the overall image quality. Captured to the right is Ganymede. It looked like a horrible blur at first. An RGB realign later has given a pleasing result to it's disk. I also gave a small increase in colour vibrance and some contrast adjustment. Some distinct patterns in the north & south temperate belts can also be seen. I have a few more Avi's to process and I will add to this post if anything new comes from them..