Scientific Artist

I think this dragonfly is a Broad Bodied Chaser.  As he decided to pay my garden a visit today – like all interesting insects that visit my garden on a nice sunny day – he got macro’d

I have wanted to image this object since seeing it in a picture years ago.  I didn’t bother because I thought it would be far too small in the Hyperstar III field of view to be of any interest.  As it turns out – it’s quite a bit bigger than I was expecting.  This is planetary nebula Abell 39 in the constellation Hercules – a perfectly spherical blue ball.

Thank you Jim for publishing the New Forest Observatory’s “Virgo/Coma mega-mosaic” as today’s Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD).

Last night I confirmed full operation of the mini-WASP array, so we are now due a new and improved generation of deep-sky images from the New Forest Observatory.

Two nights ago I added another hour of exposure time to the great globular cluster in Hercules, M13.  Didn’t add any more last night as the computer played up AND I couldn’t get the scope collimated – sometimes you just get nights like that

Along with two very nice SuperMoon images my two Little Planet images appeared on Simon Parkin’s Meridian weather slot on Tuesday 8th May at 6:20 p.m.  Video footage is Copyright Meridian News & Weather.

Here is another “Little Planet” view – this time the North Weirs area of the New Forest.

Even though we have had non-stop rain for what seems like weeks somehow the evening of May 1st was completely clear, although there was unfortunately a blazing Moon overhead.  Never mind, can still do star and star cluster shots.  So this evening I captured the brilliant blue star Spica (not processed yet) and this globular cluster, M13 in the constellation Hercules.  I really like M13 and have imaged it on many occasions.  Although the collimation wasn’t too good on the Hyperstar (I didn’t spend any time tweaking it) the result of 68 subs at 1-minute per sub speaks for itself.  I will do this one again, with better collimation, and with slightly shorter subs as well so that I can clearly define the core of the cluster.

Last one for today – an 8-frame photomicromosaic of Moss Archegonia longitudinal cross-section.

Rainy morning so decided to do some photomicroscopy this morning.  Subjects for today are a Winter Jasmine leaf cross-section at x20 and x40 magnification and a Fern Prothallium at magnification x80 using focus-stacking by Helicon Focus and 9-frames.

Each month I shall publish a high-impact image from the Scientific Artist.  For this month I have chosen beautiful comet Garradd which was acquired at the New Forest observatory earlier this year.  This image was captured using an 11″ Celestron Nexstar GPS Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescope with a Starlight Xpress M25C one-shot colour CCD (6-Megapixels).  The sub-exposures stacked to create this image were also individually processed to make an animation.  In this image North is to the right.  The comet has two tails, the pale (upward pointing) tail is the particle tail and the blue (downward pointing) tail is the “ion tail” which points away from the direction of the Sun.