tomato

I get little streaks and hot pixels appearing regularly on my all sky camera frames, and a neighbour about 150 metres away has a wood burning stove that he runs a lot during the cold months. Are they related I wonder, I always thought they were cosmic rays hitting the sensor.

Located about 6 degrees west of M31 is PGC 3990, magnitude 13.8 and about 1.5 arc minutes wide. I can't find out much about it except it is 283M light years distant so ~120x further away than M31. Despite that it is showing enough size and structure for me to spot it on the DSS overlay in Stellarium, so I thought it deserved it's 15 minutes of fame, thanks for looking. Captured with the Esprit 150/ASI178 dual rig, 10.6 hrs integration, capture details as follows: L 159 x 2 mins R 50 x 2 mins G 57 x 2 mins B 51 x 2 mins

Yes, one definitely worth waiting for👍🏼

In the absence of other variables, the atmosphere can play a significant part. Imaging a target at 75 degrees elevation guiding was at 0.4 arc secs total RMS cf. 0.5 with a target at 30 degrees elevation.

Great result! I don't know why, but it seems to me that with the images of the Hidden Galaxy posted over the last year or so, it doesn't seem so hidden anymore?

I hope it improves a little after the 25th or there are going to be a lot of frustrated folks who received a telescope for Christmas.

Well, if you are right, I'll pick one up used after Christmas to see what all the fuss is about, but it will take a while for all of those "May contain clouds" stickers to wear off.

£550 on a present you will tire of by February? I thought there was a cost of living crisis?

The fact that these products are going like hot cakes does say something about the process. The owners still want some faff, even if it is controlled, otherwise they would be spending their hard earned cash on remote imaging data sets.

Fair point but when you retire, you need faff.

Hey, it’s the faff that makes it pleasurable.😉

No worries, I should have seen the "Edited" comment at the bottom of the post.

The UK will have even less clear nights than it does now, that's just about possible.

A lovely deep M31. I must admit I fell foul of not reading the whole thread, I read the first reply and zoomed in on the stars and couldn't see anything wrong with them. I got there in the end.

This looks like the same atlas as used by Telescopius, at least the colour rendition is very similar.

Thanks Wim, yes it peaks at 39 degrees altitude from my location so getting quality data is a bit of a challenge. Also the early evening imaging window coincides with the Xmas lights show and repeated outside lights illuminating the neighbour's pets doing their business, so not ideal.

Mrs Tomato always tries to get me an astro themed birthday present and this year she went one further to get something AP related. This is what she came up with, not specifically astro but I like the sentiment expressed, if only this were possible in the UK.

Thanks, with only 5 hrs of data, NoiseXterminator was put to good use.

Even though I said I wouldn't I briefly toyed with the idea of selling the SW 16" and putting the funds towards an ES UL 16". But... I would probably need to put upwards of £1K into the fund to make it happen, and after absorbing the available info it looks like the SW could be put on a diet for less than half that so that's the plan, hopefully this will now become a build progress thread.

Here is another seldom imaged irregular galaxy, not surprising really as it is both faint (magnitude 10) and small (15' across). It is a member of the Local Group and is at a distance of 2.4 million light years, so it is an interesting comparison to make with another Local Group galaxy, M31 which is a similar distance from us. This is a total of 5hrs integration LRGB with the Esprit150/ASI178 dual rig. I collected a couple of hours of Ha data last night under very poor conditions but it didn't add anything of significance to the image. It really deserves more integration but it seems like ages since I posted a new image so here it is, thanks for looking.

Thanks everyone, the gif quality is certainly not great, it comes out better when M1 is higher in the sky but it was the best data I could get before the challenge closing date. I did indeed get a set 7 Meccano for Christmas back in 1971, the first thing I made was a model of the Lunar Rover.🙂

Any target is a joy to look at if the data capture and processing has been executed to a high standard, as in this example.

That’s a great M31, I think the colour balance is spot on. I have a version with a similar integration time and like you I somehow thought the galaxy would be more prominent but as has been said before this subject is a lot trickier to image than people might expect.

I have operated two mounts simultaneously and a big dual rig, in terms of least hassle I prefer the dual rig. Sure, getting the FOVs aligned is a hassle but only needs to be done once. The second scope just dumbly takes images, no need to worry about finding the target or guiding.

A couple of nights ago my guiding was 33% better after the flip but I was imaging a target only ~30 degrees above the horizon and the guiding was improving prior to the flip, so seeing was playing a big part, I think.