Pegasus to Fomalhaut (via Jupiter)

This non guided shot shows the view from Pegasus to the southern horizon

Sundog

There were a nice set of sundogs (parhelia) last evening. Here is a picture of one with contrail shadow.

The view from down under

At the BAA Deep Sky Section meeting the other day there was an interesting talk about imaging via remote telescopes. The scopes mentioned were #1-Sierra Stars Observatory in New Mexico where you request particular images and your request is queued and done. #2- Global Rent a Scope based also in NM and in Australia, where you control the scope in real time. These cost about £1 per minute. Probably a better deal on SSO than GRAS because there you are charged only for the exposure time rather than the slew, focus time etc. The BAA offer a discount if Council feel that you have a worthy project.

Anyway GRAS offer a try before you buy scheme with scope and image quality limitations, so I signed up for that. Most of last week it was snowing in New Mexico and Australia was offline. On Friday morning G13 (Takahashi Sky 90 with SBIG ST-2000XMC on a Paramount) was available in oz so I grabbed it and did a couple of 600sec (10 min) images including this one of the Trifid nebula. Within seconds the jpeg was delivered in my mail. You need to sign up for the full package in order to be able to download full res FITS images.

The blurb on site compares the economics of GRAS compared to the cost of the whole system - pointing out that the money you spend on your own kit just gives so many clear nights in a year, whereas using a remote system you have a much better chance of many clear nights for the same number of £s.

So will I go for it? I suppose that if we have winters like that now finished ,compounded with a time of ill health discouraging me from going out in the cold I might.

On the other hand it may be easier to make my observatory remotely operable.

Off topic

Haven't done much astronomy for a while (actually I did do a polar alignment tonight) but I've been into GigaPanning. This is the combo of a robotised tripod head centred on the nodal point of a compact camera set to full zoom. This enables extremely detailed panoramas - including from tens to hundreds of images. It comes from the people who assemble the images from the Mars Spirit and Opportunity probes. These are a couple of early links (luckily the GigaPan site has room for these large images
http://gigapan.org/gigapans/43208/.


http://gigapan.org/gigapans/43929/

Jupiter

This is Jupiter from last night (2am Sunday morning). Need to sort out settings on webcam etc - couldn't reach focus with barlow so this was only at f10.
Not sure if Jupiter's new (impact site?) is just leaving bottom right but there are some prominent blue plumes.

Volcanic sunset

Space Weather has an alert for volcanic sunsets caused by worldwide aerosols from Sarychev Peak in Russia- eruption June 12th. Not quite the "Pinatubo purple" but still a very nice sight.

Noctilucent Clouds -the movie!

I missed any NLC displays in 2008 so I'm glad to have caught a couple of displays(so far ) this month. I have to go about 400yds N of my garden to view the North horizon. This time lapse movie is a series of 3second exposures every 30sec. 11PM GMT 17th June.