Eerie full moon over Watton

Rising over the trees was the rusty coloured full moon, slowing loosing it's battle to the gathering storm clouds. Taken at 21.49 this evening

Summer Triangle

High above us in July we can see 3 of the brightest stars in the summer sky. They form an astronomical "asterim" ( an imaginary) triangle that cuts into the soft glow of the milky way.The closest of the three is Altair 16 light years away and 10 times as bright as our Sun. Secondly is Vega 25 light years away and featured in the Jodie Foster film "Contact" as a possible source of
intelligent life. Our final giant is Deneb. It appears only slightly dimmer than the other two but fires up at a massive 70,000 times brighter than the sun and a mind
blowing 1550 light years or 26 times the distance of Vega. As you are aware this composite of of course not to scale.

Ngc 6888 The Crescent Nebula

Some targets just need a little more than a DSLR can deliver. I think the crescent nebula is one of them. Last year I tried this target, never published the image because I was not happy with the result.
Despite the guiding working well and subs of 5 minutes I am still not entirely happy with the amount of data collected. There is some indication of some tenuous nebulosity surrounding the nebula.

Sol

The Sun Saturday. You can just make out the sun spot AR1791 centre left. They are caused by interactions with the Sun's magnetic field, But a sunspot is somewhat like the cap on a coke bottle: shake it up, and you can generate a big eruption. Sunspots occur over regions of intense magnetic activity, and when that energy is released, solar flares and big storms called coronal mass ejections erupt from sunspots. I may invest in a solar continuum filter. Those using them appear to show granulation in the surface. I would be grateful for a bit of feedback if you use one. This image was taken through a avi video file from my DSLR through the 90mm refractor Approx 1000 frames stacked in Registax and colour corrected from a white light filter.

Alberio

In the heart of the summer triangle floating in the sea of stars from ourown milky way's spiral arm lies Albireo . A close binary star system resolved here
and appears to make the star egg shaped. At approx 430 light years away. Visually
this yellow star has a wonderful companion that is a striking Blue. This 50 minute exposure
has drowned the faint colour away. Sorry!!

Perhaps a bit more aggressive processing will bring out some colour.

M 52 & a Bubble

Picture the scene, France was bathed in a period of mourning for

King Louis XV a struggling economy and battle scarred France

decended futher into dissaray from decades of war that was soon

to fall to the people in the French Revolution . Meanwhile French

astronomer and comet hunter Charles Messier had found another faint object to add to his expanding catalogue of (non cometary bodies), whilst observing a comet in the same region .Catalogued as galactic open star cluster (M52) Approx 5000 light years away and 35 million years old, this collection of approx 200 stars has shone for countless eons of time. You will also notice a bubble of glowing gas, at more than twice the distance of M52 this shockwave of expanding gas & dust was created and illuminated by the energetic radiation from a

massive star. This image was taken last night or should I say early this morning for what was an all nighter. The guiding worked well all night allowing for 5 minute sub frames to give me this 1hour 15 minute shot. Focus was a few microns off though.

Mu cephei

I have had another go at the Garnet star (Mu Cephei) Far left and associated nebulosity IC 1396. This time using the UHC filter. I never usually over process an image, but I have gone a little overboard this time just to see what is there. 5 minutes shy of 2 hours has revealed some deep stuff. I am very pleased with star shapes using 5 minute guided subs. I want to try the same 2 hours without the filter now.

Polar Alignment.

I can say I have never been perfectly happy with my polar alignment of my set up. Don't get me wrong it has never been out by more that a gnats bits. But sometimes that is enough to send the mount into a spin. I have moaned a few times about PHD and the Dec tracking, it just seemed to go haywire. The graph plot was up and down worse than the UK economy. So frustrating at times, I could never manage exposures more than 2 minutes at best. I had come to accept this and sat and watched patiently many times as a hundred or so short exposure  images aligned and stacked together. However  I recently came across a programme that Bob http://www.rsamuel.me.uk/astroblog/called Alignmaster. http://www.alignmaster.de/  had used. A clever little programme by Matthias Garzaroll. I wont bother explaining the ins and outs you can see from it's homepage the process and how simple it is. A trial version is activated by a registration key sent via email. After the small adjustments I made, I made on it's recommendation a second alignment to increase accuracy and within 10 minutes I was done. I tightened up all loose screws and made sure nothing had moved. I sent the goto to Mu Cephei and began PHD. After its set up all was well as the star remained central. I like to use the graph function to see where / when  errors are creeping in. I left the observatory for a while and returned 10 minutes later to see the graph had not deviated a pixel's width the entire time. I was amazed to see the difference. The Canon was already connected to balance up the system. So i fired off a couple of 10 minute exposures and was truly amazed at the result. I would have done more but the following day was my first day back after my 18 days holiday with a 7.30 am start. By now it was gone midnight. Before you call me an astronomical lightweight. We have suffered a bit from jet lag.
It looks like I will have to start a new library of darks too now. Here is the result of just 2 x 10 minute exposures tweaked of course in Images plus. I am eager to get back outside and see what 3-4 hours worth of 10 minute subs can deliver.Watch this space.

Dominican Republic

I have included a few sunrise, sunset pics in the past. Here are a few of my favourites from our recent holiday in the Dominican Republic.It was unfortunate that the evening skies were hazy. So I never got the chance to see Sagittarius high in the south.

Planetary Alignment

We had a night flight travelling home from our holiday in the Dominican Republic last week. Our seats were nicely positioned to get a view and a snapshot of the Alignment of Mercury, Venus & Jupiter. Sorry it's a bit shakey. The best one I could get travelling at 500mph. Taken over the Atlantic ocean 700 miles East of Bermuda at approx 35,000 ft.

The Magnificent M87

A behemoth in galaxy terms M87 or Virgo 1 is a target that a DSLR does not take full advantage of. Especially an imaging set up for wide field. A super giant elliptical that is almost  with no dust lanes. A much deeper exposure is required to capture the plasma flow from the galaxies active nucleus.Although it does look like I have captured the inner part closest to the core.What do you think?. Sporting a super massive black hole some 6.6 billion solar masses & larger than our sun -Pluto orbit,it churns out enough X rays, Gamma rays, Radio waves to keep the professional astronomers and orbiting telescopes busy for decades to come.
Just 46 minutes worth of data here. I had problems with the guiding and rejected more than half of the 2 minute guided frames. Darks subtracted and a gradient removal.