Clear night at last!

At last...the rain has cleared and left a clear and frosty night!
Orion was in it's glory tonight, so a chance to take some images of the Orion Nebula and maybe the Running Man Nebula.

Took a while to align the SLT because I kept pressing the wrong buttons on the handset in the dark, but no problem once the skyalign found it's alignment stars. This mount is brilliant, aligns not only into the eyepiece, but also on screen on the laptop with the webcam. Tracking is great and rotation when imaging is not a problem any more with Registax 4 with the multi-align function.
Managed to image the Running Man Nebula, but not enough detail to show the nebula itself, can see the star cluster clearly though.

The image above of the Orion Nebula is 15 frames stacked, 30s per frame, processed in Registax 4.

Storm Force Winds!

Yesterday brought the worst storms since the famous 'hurricane' in 1990. By lunchtime the winds had reached 90mph and causing an awful lot of damage. At school we brought the children inside at lunch time because it was so dangerous out on the playground. The Winter Hill Transmitter recorded wind speeds of 99mph!

Today the wind is still strong, far too strong to attempt taking a scope outside, but the forecast looks good...it's getting cold...crisp, starry nights? Thats what I want really want!

First attempt with the SLT mount

Image of the spiral galaxy NGC 2776 taken by the JMU Robotic Telescope. The telescope took this picture for me last month. Cool!!


Today the sun shone brightly!

The first day that it hasn't rained for weeks!

Tonight was clear, so I took out my Celestron SLT mount with the Skywatcher ST80 fitted to the mount. I thought alignment might be tricky, but it wasn't, I set up the mount at the back of the garden and did a three star alignment. I just chose three bright stars and away it went!
From my handset list I chose the Orion Nebula, pressed ENTER and there it was in the eyepiece! Tried a few others in the list to check the slew on the scope...it worked fine! Tracking perfect!

A nice piece of kit...i'm really pleased. I now want to link the SLT to my Laptop so that I can select targets from the computer and hopefully be able to image some of the objects listed.

Comet McNaught

A great event, if I can get chance to see it and even take images of it...The Comet McNaught!
This comet can now be seen low in the western sky at sunset along with the planet Venus. The comet is very bright and getting brighter! Trouble is...the weather here in Bolton, it has rained and rained, today gale force winds as well! With any luck there might be a chance over the next couple of days to see this great event...lets see!

Some great images here of Comet McNaught by Pete Laurence.

http://www.digitalsky.org.uk/comets/P1_McNaught/C2006-P1-McNaught_Jan10.html