wingeing Pom

This is what you get when you add all the Sky90 data to all the 200mm lens data giving composite images with around 24-hours of total exposure time in each case. Greg

Just making a start on the Rosette with the 200mm lenses. Greg

Greg

I got another 10 x 20-minute subs on IC410/IC405 last night with the 200mm lenses, ASI 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras and Optolong L-Enhance filters. I added these to the 8 subs taken previously and this is the result. I will try and get another 12 subs giving a total of 10-hours of data and then I'll call it a day on this one. Greg

https://epod.usra.edu/blog/2023/01/3-d-view-of-dna.html Greg

A freezing cold, but clear, Moonless night last night. I set up the 200mm lenses with the ASI 2600 MC Pro CMOS cameras and Optolong L-Enhance filters on the Calironia nebula. Managed to get 24 x 20-minute subs (I wimped out at midnight, but could have gone on to 3 a.m. if I was made of stronger stuff). Managed to get a lot of the "nose" on this one which I know would have been quite impossible without the filters. I will get more data on this one when it passes the Meridian, but any more clear nights for now will be on building up the IC410/IC405 data. Greg

As I have access to the original FITS subs, I threw out 16 blobby images and was left with 36 x 10-second subs to stack. The result is a bit sharper Greg

Ahh - looking at the FITS header I see that the close up of the Trapezium was at f#6.3 on the back of the C11 with 10-second exposures.

Well this is quite extraordinary. I discovered a huge pile of DVDs last week and I just spent a few days downloading them all onto an HDD. The data was all very old (mostly around 2005) and is all taken with the original Hyperstar (no collimation or rotation adjusters) on a C11 with a tiny little H9C OSC CCD (1.4 Mpixels). Now as I had only JUST started off imaging, I knew absolutely nothing about sub-exposure times, or basically anything, so these two images were taken with 30 - 40-second subs, and there were 150 - 200 subs stacked for each image. As you can see - the Trapezium region of M42 is not completely blown out - unlike all my later "better" work!! So by pure luck I was actually doing better early on when I didn't know what I was doing compared to later on when I actually thought I'd learned a few things. This is not the first time that my initial best guess turned out to be almost optimum These images are from February 2005.

And remember - you saw it on here first Greg

Good old Wolfram Research came up trumps for me and they have published my Solid Golden Angle in their Notebook Archives - so at least there is now a name associated with the discovery https://notebookarchive.org/the-golden-solid-angle--2022-12-dtu824g/ Greg

Here is a Sky90/26C OSC CCD and 200mm lens/ASI 2600MC Pro CMOS camera composite of the IC410/405 region - with star reduction This is 30-hours and 37-minutes worth of data. Looks more noisy than it is as this is under half resolution. Greg

And here's some original Hyperstar data added to the above (the original Hyperstar used a tiny H9C chip which is why the FOV is so small). Greg

Here is a composite image of the Rosette nebula combining Sky90 and Hyperstar 4 data using RegiStar - a total of around 15-hours exposure time in this one Greg

Another hobby of mine is "experimental mathematics" - I think I may have mentioned (ages ago) my Prime number hunting server. Well way back in June 2007 (just before actually) I discovered something that seems to have been overlooked for centuries - The Golden Solid Angle. Everybody knows the basics, the 1-D Golden Ratio, the 2-D Golden Angle (equal to 2*Pi/Golden Ratio^2) and there it seems to have come to a halt for a few centuries. Why hasn't anybody (until moi) taken this up one further dimension to form the Golden Solid Angle? Or have they? Nobody has got back to me on this and I've not seen it in any book or publication on the subject. So why not? To find the Golden Solid Angle (in steradians) is pretty straightforward. Draw a sphere of radius r with the total surface area of the sphere being 1 + Golden Ratio. Then the solid angle subtended by the unity area part of the sphere is the Golden Solid Angle which is given by 4*Pi/Golden Ratio^2. I have just sent this off to Wolfram Mathematica to see if they will publish it. Way back in 2007 I sent it off to the Mathematical Gazette and they answered - "Just because it is a new discovery in mathematics doesn't make it necessarily publishable" which after a lifetime in science with over 120 refereed research journal publications to my name - was a new one on me. Let's see if the Stephen Wolfram outfit are a little more enlightened - or not Greg