Passing almost directly overhead (83 degees) on 22nd April 2011 were the automated Russian cargo vehicle Progress 41P and the International Space Station. Progress 41P first appeared in the West at 9:48 p.m. followed just one minute later by the International Space Station (ISS). Both disappeared from view in the ENE at an elevation of 25 degrees. In this image both tracks are overlaid as they were both in the same orbit. It was a fantastic sight with just a layer of thin high cloud preventing perfection (and preventing me from imaging).
Recently processed by Noel Carboni this data was acquired just a few days ago at the New Forest Observatory. This image shows the Whale & Hockey Stick galaxies in Coma Berenices, and to the lower/far left there are a pair of tiny interacting galaxies called “The Mice”. What would be an unbalanced frame gains balance between the bunch of bright stars at the bottom and the small galaxies at the top. Unfortunately it is not always possible to play this trick 🙂
Noel Carboni processed the Leo Trio data taken a few days ago (see post below) and added some old data of ours taken with the Hyperstar 1 and a little H9C one-shot colour camera. You can see the result here. The bright star bottom right is Chertan and North is to the right in this image.
Last night (4th April 2011) Simon Parkin showed the Leo Trio of galaxies as the weather picture on his weather slot on Meridian TV News and Weather. Video footage Copyright Meridian TV News and Weather. Please view the video here.
We had an unexpectedly clear night last night and I managed to get a full 3 and a half hours total imaging time on the M53 region with the Sky 90/M25C. There’s a bonus of another globular cluster at the top of the image. 200-second sub-exposures, and 63 of them in total produced this deep-sky image of the area. I did the processing on the version shown here – Noel will do a much better job on the data when he gets round to looking at it 🙂
Here is a very quick and nasty Greg Parker process of some data captured over 4 hours last night – Noel will be able to do a far better job with this. Very good news is that I got rid of a load of very annoying dust bunnies which turned out to be on the surface of the CCD chip. Luckily I had some proprietary paint-on polymer to do the cleaning.
