Society for Popular Astronomy

I don't have an educational astronomical story to tell, nor can I offer images of deep space exotica. However, I can offer you a quite reasonable (I think) shot of a pleasant and well-known open cluster, M38, and its often overlooked companion, NGC 1907. http://suburban-skies.blogspot.com/2010/04/m3...

I have never been able to directly see NGC 3628 from my location, although the aperture you have used might help there. Don't know what you mean by a "PDA skecth combination" - could you explain for us non-computer literate-types? I like the immediacy of your sketches and am intrigued as t...

Ah, the curse of the cranky Skysensor - I know exactly what you mean. I have also been plagued by equipment woes, hence my lack of activity recently. I think I have solved exactly the same problem you have, by fixing an aluminium plate to the back of the handset and securely fixing the cable to it. ...

It's remarkable how you've managed to capture quasars of 20th magnitude with just 2 minute subs. Did you selectively stretch the image around the central galaxy or is that just how it "came out in the wash"? However you did it, it's a great image and a really informative commentary. I will...

Fantastic Crab: well done!

A good display last night at around 10.30pm onwards... http://suburban-skies.blogspot.com/2009/07/nlcs-over-thames-valley.html This year has given me my first sight of these beautiful phenomena, and I was surprised not to see more shots on today's gallery. Seems there was a bit of a NLC storm last n...

Something I've never seen before. Are these the noctilucent clouds I've heard rumour of? http://suburban-skies.blogspot.com/2009/06/nlcs.html I happened to look out of my bedroom window just now (11.15 pm) and hastily grabbed a camera. By the time I rushed downstairs to get a tripod and some better ...

An effort from last night's reasonably clear skies over the Thames estuary...

http://suburban-skies.blogspot.com/2009 ... ier-3.html

First of all, thanks for the comments. Cliff & "Bissgets": I thought I'd check out my "mystery nebula" on the SLOAN digital sky survey. Entering the SkyMAP J2000 co-ordinates for PGC 34279 (RA 11h14m53s, dec 54deg57'38'') into the SDSS search engine (at http://cas.sdss.org/as...

Here's my effort at imaging one of the fainter objects in the Messier catalogue. It's a tribute to Pierre Mechain's eyesight that he saw it all, given that he was using a much less sophisticated 'scope than the ones most of us enjoy using today, (although I guess skies were darker back in 1781)... h...

Snatched from the jaws of yet another hazed-out evening last Friday.

http://suburban-skies.blogspot.com/2009 ... ebula.html

Certainly this winter so far has had the the least number of observing and imaging opportunities that I can remember...

From the evening of January 18th, using a 135mm telephoto lens, SXV-H9 monochrome CCD and an ATIK filter wheel with Astronomix LRGB filters...

http://suburban-skies.blogspot.com/2009 ... iades.html

Cliff: Yes, AIP4Win V1 was a clunker for colour processing - I did exactly the same as you for an image of M52 (it's on my blog somewhere). I gather the new version is a lot slicker, but rather like you, I think "colour" for DS is subjective, so v1 works for me. I like to see star colour i...

Thanks to everyone for comments. Cliff: I basically did four lots of processing for each L, R, G and B channel, and then combined them for the colour output. That's four lots of images, flats and dark flats, with a set of darks at the end for both full frame and 2x2 binned hot pixel bashing (even th...

I finally got around to putting together an LRGB image of M35, that fabulous open cluster in Gemini. http://suburban-skies.blogspot.com/2008/12/messier-35.html The subframes were taken back in January but I've only recently been able to put them together. This was my first attempt at LRGB imaging an...