Perfect Night

Pleiades on Wednesday Night with the brighter stars Atlas, Pleiane, Alcyone and Merope - about half of the Pleiades open cluster.

Wednesday night brought almost perfect conditions, I set up both scopes to see what I could capture. Found the Dumbell Nebula and Ring Nebula with no problem using my Skywatcher 130m, tracking seemed good, so I tried to image the Dumbell. In the eyepiece there it was clear as a bell (dumbell!!) but with the camera it just ain't there...weird! The Pleiades was in full view so tried an image with the ST80 and focal reducer to capture the whole of the open cluster. Trouble is Pleiades is quite large and could only manage part of it. A beautiful sight visually with the ST80!
Bought a copy of 'Universe' by DK, a superb book with an incredible amount of information about the science involved and lovely images.
My plans for this week are to image my first comet. The SWAN COMET is currently in Hercules very near M13 and is visually quite bright, conditions look good during this week so watch this space!

Digital Natives

Teepees for the 'Digital Natives' at the conference


The weather now is turning quite Autumnal, but the temperature is still well above average with no frost yet. The Busy Lizzies and Marigolds in my garden are still thriving! Its half term and the last week brought the ICT Conference which was thoroughly enjoyable with Will Richardson from the USA giving a great insight into Blogging. Check out the Will Richardson Blog with loads of stuff about the conference.
On the Astro theme...kids pick things up so easily, they are Digital Natives, technology is part of their lives! Older people however can be called Digital Imigrants, the technology is there but we are learning. So can we get the kids to turn to the skies and look at the technology that brings us images of objects light years away and sends spaceships to image the outer planets? I'm trying...by using the Robotic Telescopes, kids can have time on the Faulkes Telescope and request jobs to the Bradford Robotic Telescope and we are doing that. Let's see what happens!

M1 The Crab Nebula (At last!)

I've waited ages for this image...it's the famous Crab Nebula, this supernova was noted on July 4, 1054 A.D. by Chinese astronomers as a new or "guest star," and was about four times brighter than Venus.

I have tried to find this object myself but without success, so again, I turned to the BRT to take a picture of this DSO.

The image was processed first with the FITS applet and then split into RGB channels with PSP and adjusted Gamma and contrast. The image above is the green channel which shows some detail of the filaments in M1. I really like this image, been worth waiting for!

Here is the info:

Request ID 36664
Job ID 25751
Object Type MESSIER
Object ID 1
Object Name The Crab Nebula
Exposure Time 120000 ms
Filter Type Colour
Dark frame Instant
Site Name Tenerife
Telescope Type Name Galaxy
Telescope Name Galaxy Camera
Request Time 23:16 on Friday 22 September 2006 (22:16:11 UTC)
Completion Time 03:09 on Monday 2 October 2006 (02:09:42 UTC)
Comments The Crab Nebula
Status Complete

M31 and M110 a nice pair!

This is latest image from the BRT of the Andromeda Galaxy but this time taken with the cluster camera and adjusting the exposure. After some processing with Photoshop and PSP5 the results are fantastic! You can see M110 the partner galaxy to Andromeda which I cannot see with my own images.

Saw a lovely view of Orion the other morning, can't wait for it to appear in the sky in the evening!

Here are the details fro BRT of M31 and M110:

Your Job

Request ID 37057
Job ID 26661
Object Type MESSIER
Object ID 31
Object Name The Andromeda Galaxy
Exposure Time 60000 ms
Filter Type Colour
Dark frame Instant
Site Name Tenerife
Telescope Type Name Cluster
Telescope Name Cluster Camera
Request Time 22:18 on Thursday 28 September 2006 (21:18:11 UTC)
Completion Time 05:16 on Sunday 1 October 2006 (04:16:46 UTC)
Comments M31 Wide Field
Status Complete