The Horsehead Nebula

The winter months were not great from my location, that and the bloody tree facing due south, I only managed just over an hour on this iconic target, it beats too the image I took when featured on the Sky At Night Programme when Pete Lawrence visited our Society Breckland Astronmoical Society to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Hubble. New image at top.  I know heavily cropped but an amazing difference in camera technology and processing technique.

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.

The Sky at Night Update.

Last night was an amazing night for me and the society http://www.brecklandastro.org.uk/. For the second time now we played host to the sky at Night crew to take part in Aprils show that pays homage to the Hubble space telescope and it's 25 years of service. The focus of the show will be the iconic images produced by hubble. The club members had selected thier own favourite & best images for targets that hubble has imaged and the crew selected a few for the show. Richard's, Bob's and my own images were selected. We each done a piece to camera answering questions from Pete Lawrence. Living in hope they don't end up on the cutting room floor. The show will be broadcast on April 12th on BBC4

The Sky At Night

Our society http://www.brecklandastro.org.uk/ will once again play host to the Sky at night team. Hopefully the weather will hold for some observing. I hope to show the team some of my deep images showing the mag 20+ galaxies & quasars I have captured. The topic is Hubble's "Deep field" to coinside with it's 25th anniversary. I hope they will be interested. Watch this space for an update.

A trio in Leo.

Unfortunately I have been ill and off work these past few months and my astronomy has taken a back seat. along with my cycling and my passion for just about everything that means the world to me.  I have been outside just 3 times since. I am now thankfully on the road to recovery with the support of my wonderful partner & family plus some great close friends. Mentioning no names Des & Phil oops, and once again my love for astronomy and everything else is returning. Also a big thanks also to all my colleagues that have asked after me at work. most of which have a gander as to what this astro geek gets up to at night. I enjoy talking to you guys & gals about my amazing hobby.

 -------------------------------------------------

Looking back over some old images. I found the ever popular Leo triplet of galaxies. Taken with the Canon 40D. I knew I could improve on it so that was the nights target. Taken through the Williams Optics GT81 and using 20 minute guided sub exposures. Calibrated with Dark frames in Maxim DL5. Processed in photoshop. This final cropped image is 3 hours of data. A very pleasing result Perfect focus and some lovely lane structure in all 3 galaxies.

Me being me I wasn't just satisfied with that. So I loaded Carte Du Ceil and had a closer look. I downloaded the PGC Principle Galaxies Catalogue and brought up my field of view.  The field lit up with large number of very little red dots. I loaded side by side Photoshop with my image. It soon became very clear that I had a deep image. The 15th- 18th magnitude galaxies were easily visible. After finding a few dozen I thought I should mark them and see how many I could find. There was a few places I must have missed as I seem to be adding more each time I    look. So far the total is 153 and counting.

The fainter galaxies were somewhat more of a challenge.

The image has been plate solved and I needed this to locate and verify the position of the objects that were barely visible even at 400 x  zoom in Photoshop. But I did find that an inverse of the frame gives greater contrast as some of the faintest smudges are just a couple of shades brighter than the background.

Incredibly small movements in the mouse movement moved the RA and DEC by arc seconds across the frame and CDC confirms the location of PGC 3542189. As I mentioned earlier the subtle difference in colour in the centre of the square with a contrast boost and inverted. reveals the presence of this Magnitude 20.31 Galaxy. Position confirmed as RA:11:18:17 and 
DEC :13:03:11. Unfortunately I am unable to find any information on the galaxy type or distance / redshift other than it has been catalogued.

 ------------------------------------------------

 I just picked up on my emails to learn  that our society http://www.brecklandastro.org.uk/ will again host the presenters of the Sky at night programme for a piece based on the HST. and it's deep field images. I think I will point the scopes next clear night and put in a contribution of my own deep field. They may be interested in what I have just done as well as a previous post on M97 & M108 with some very distant quasars. We will wait and see.

40th Birthday Pressie

What an amazing day we had. Myself and fellow Breckland astronomical society member John Gionis (link to his blog to your right) Set off at 3.00pm in the pouring rain, anticipation high and nervous at the same time. Our mission as we chose to accept it was to take a little flight in a specially converted 737 fly up to about 32,000 ft and do a few loops around the Orkney Islands to view the most spectacular event of the Aurora Borealis. The trip was arranged through the only company offering such tours http://www.auroraflights.co.uk/







We were treated to talks from "The Sky At Nights" imaging specialist Mr Pete Lawrence and the magazine's reviews editor Mr Paul Money. Pictured Paul Lawrence.




[Photo]The pre-flight presentations were held in Radisson Blu Hotel, Stansted Airport. Paul Money provided a 30 minute talk on the stars and constellations that would be visible during the flight while Pete Lawrence explained the connections between the Sun and the Aurora.The activity predictions for tonight were fairly subdued. The vertical component of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), known as Bz, had swung south earlier in the day and this gave us some hope for the flight. If Bz points south, the IMF and Earth's magnetic field can connect and auroral displays are more likely to occur. If Bz is north, the fields oppose one another and the aurora tends to be quiet.During the flight, the stars looked beautifully crisp and clear with Paul Money and Pete Lawrence providing an enthusiastic commentary on what could be seen in terms of the stars, constellations and any auroral activity outside the plane. Fortunately, on this occasion, the southerly Bz did work for us and a display was seen. We did make a small course correction by climbing a bit higher and travelling a little futher up to the Faroe Islands at 62°00’N. Although rays and curtains were not very evident this evening, the display did show a lot of horizontal banding and this was seen to change throughout the flight. Pete attempted to photograph the aurora and a couple of his images are shown here.