Gary & Dave of Pulsar Observatories Ltd. delivered and fitted the fibreglass dome for the new mini-WASP imaging array soon to be operational at the New Forest Observatory. The mini-WASP array details can be followed on the New Forest Observatory web site – but in a nutshell – the mini-WASP borrows the idea of using multiple imaging scopes and cameras from the SUPERWASP project – basically to get the most data downloaded in the shortest possible time. When fully kitted out and operational this will be the most powerful amateur deep-sky imaging facility on the planet 🙂
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.
Had a decent clear night last night and managed to grab 3 and a half hours of 10-minute subs. This time I was galaxy hunting in Leo and set up on the region that contains M95, M96 and M105. Quite a few other galaxies can be seen in this image as well. Image taken last night and processed by Noel Carboni in Florida U.S.A. today – how’s that for a fast turn around?
I took this image of Jupiter close to Mercury over the Forest tonight, just after sunset. Jupiter is the brighter planet at the top, Mercury is the red planet at the lower right.
Noel Carboni (Florida, U.S.A.) did some clean up processing on this one before sending back to me – so this image has already been once around the planet 🙂 Canon 5D with 100-400mm zoom and x1.4 converter, ISO 400, 3-seconds, f#18.
I think that Jupiter and Mercury will be at their closest in 3-days time. If you do want to see them – DO NOT – scan across the West with telescopes or binoculars until the Sun has FULLY set!!!!
Managed to get 4 and a half hours worth of imaging time on Phecda (star), M109 and at least 25 other galaxies in Ursa Major last night. Should turn out to be a very nice image with ultra bright (blue) Phecda contrasting with all the faint fuzzies (galaxies) in the region. Reasonably good seeing too – we’ve been very lucky with the skies at the beginning of this month – I think it is due to end soon according to the forecasts.
where pure science meets art
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