First image from Ucel (near Aubenas) on holiday to France; VdB 152

[astrovirus]

Hi group, this summer me and my family again travelled to sunny and hot (40°C in the second week) France to enjoy a good summer holiday. Loaded my 70kg of astrophotography equipment in the back of the family car to do some imaging as well under these darker Southern skies, compared to my Dutch local sky.

The first night out started with a small disaster as I couldn’t get my guiding working. Only 3 days before we set off for France I finally got my QHY5 guidecam installed under Oracle Virtual Box running XP pro (which I need as my astrocam is a Canon 350D that has no Win7 64 bits drivers, and my home observing machine (desktop PC) also runs XP pro so I don’t want to flash my QHY5 to run under Win7 64 bits). I needed to run everything in a virtual box as my old laptop video card crashed after my son dropped a glass of lemonade on it when our dog barked at some noise outside, so I had to upgrade to a Win7 64 bits laptop. Although everything seemed OK, PHD couldn’t calibrate as no guide pulses would reach the mount via ST4 (also tested this on manual guide in PHD). Tired I went to sleep and the next day I got pulse guiding up and running (which I could not the other night, probably due to fatigue).

So I finally got out to image again, and pulse guiding really worked well for me, so well, that I am considering to stick with it at home too. I managed to get 2 targets over the 3 remaining nights I was out and here is the first one, shot on nights 2 and 3. It’s VdB 152 / Cederblad 201, a spectacular dusty region in Cepheus. Hope you like it. The other target still on the processing board is Barnard 150, but that suffers from some nasty gradient due to lights nearby my imaging position that first night (I relocated for nights 2 and 3).

VdB 152 / Cederblad 201: http://www.astrovirus.nl/Gallery_VdB152-2012.html

High res version (link on my page) and info on my site.

Thanks for watching,

Regards Tim

[MoggotLover]

Very nice Tim !

Sent from my GT-S5830 using Tapatalk 2

[Cath]

A very pleasing and easy on the eyes image to look at Tim, a nice texture to it

[Gina]

Nice one

[ollypenrice]

I'm glad you liked our southern French skies! These dark objects really need dark sites. This looks super and is an object I have yet to image from here. This is an inspiration to get to it.

Olly

[ronaldo999]

very nice image, looks like you are getting nice clear skies, are they always so good?

[astrovirus]

Thanks for the compliments. Yes Olly, I love your French skies, nice sunny (and warm) during the day and most of the time clear and dark during the nights. This is my third year in a row I took all my gear down South. I believe Maurice Toet was at your site during the same week, as he imaged some lovely dark stuff in the same part of skies. Maybe I'll visit your site in the future as it sounds very promissing.

Regards Tim