Scientific Artist

The main reason I went to work in a University way back in 1987 was the belief that I would be surrounded by a bunch of  intellectual heavyweights who would be able to answer any and all of my questions.

It was only a matter of a couple of years before I realised how naive I had been

And then only a couple more years before the Internet was born and provided my with what I was looking for initially  

O.K. so the day has finally arrived and “they” are now replacing the Sodium street lights around here with white light LED lamps.

Isn’t it absolutely marvelous how “they” can get their act together AND spend a huge pile of our cash on something that nobody either wants or needs around here.

And yet – replacing the noisy Aluminium phone lines which are slugging Broadband speeds by a factor of 5 due to the error corrections needing to be applied – appears nowhere in “their” plans.

You gotta love this 3rd world country we live in.

I have recently received a few inquiries asking where people can buy the specialist Xenon flashguns I use in my high-speed flash photography.

The units are made by THIS company in Ely, Cambridgeshire.  Check out their prices, for a unique piece of kit that cannot be purchased anywhere else on the planet, I believe they represent unbelievably good value for money

Managed to bag today’s Earth Science Picture of the day with an extreme wide-field image of the Altair region showing Alshain, Tarazed and the dark nebula Barnard’s “E”.

That is EPOD number 62  Thank you Jim for continuing to publish our work.

The Hyperstar III was dis-assembled while I ran some experiments on the 200mm Canon DSLR lens which I piggy-backed on the C11.  Now the experiments have been run I removed the kludge from the back of the C11 and have re-commissioned the Hyperstar III.  All the software/hardware is running and talking to each other and all I need to do now is focus train and collimate the Hyperstar III, it looks pretty close as it is and won’t need a great deal of tweaking

Last night I managed 16 x 5-minute subs on the Double Cluster region using the Canon 200mm lens with the M25C OSC and a 52mm IDAS filter on the front of the lens.  The filter stops the lens down to f#3.85 with the native lens diaphragm wide open – hence no 8-pointed diffraction spikes  Lots of water vapour in the air – but fortunately no Moon.

One day after the actual Supermoon – I captured the Moon in colour here.

Here  you can see a Canon 5D MkII plus Canon 200mm lens image of the Veil nebula region.  The actual Veil nebula also had data composited in from Hyperstar III data.

The huge field of view afforded by the imaging combo really puts the Veil nebula into perspective.  Most views do not show the dark nebula to the top right of the Veil.

I managed to grab a few 5-minute subs of this comet as it passed close to Epsilon Cassiopeiae on the evening of 22/08/2014 and the morning of 23/08/2014.

Sky90/M26C on the mini-WASP array, 21 x 5-minute subs – processed and stacked using SUM.

The comet was rapidly approaching Caldwell 8 when these sub-exposures were taken.

Last night was a very rare night.  Clear, Moonless, and the Milky Way like I’ve never seen it before from the New Forest Observatory – magic

I used the 200mm Canon lens with the M26C OSC CCD on the mini-WASP array to capture Kemble’s Cascade.

31 subs at 5-minutes per sub with a 52mm IDAS filter on the front of the 72mm lens (so the diffraction spikes are artificial).