We went out again last week, here is another attempt at Jupiter, it is getting better, although you can see the camera pixels on this one but we have two moons too, definite progress.  By the way, it’s really easy to see Jupiter’s moons and when we took the picture the great red spot was on the other side. We took more than 15,000 exposures thanks to a comment posted on this blog and it worked, thanks for that!

Next I’ll show you the prettiest colour picture I’ve managed to make so far of the Orion Nebula using different filters.  It isn’t great but I’ve spent hours trying to do different things and this is the best I’ve come up with in terms of aesthetics so far.

So thanks to all for following the blog in 2014 and I hope you have a good holiday!

Orion Nebula M42

The 42nd object in the catalogue of Messier (M42) is called the Orion Nebula.  We’ve recently taken delivery of our better quality CCD camera, which is an Atik 383L+ and we tried it for the first time tonight.  We (Sunayana and I) got this image of the Orion Nebula, which is not bad for a start.  We also got one with a shorter exposure

As you can see it’s sharper.  Perhaps we need to stack images and see if we can get the sharpness with the cloud details as well. But we didn’t get very far.  But the camera works!

We were going to go for something else but we run out of batteries… Our car battery is flat because we’ve been using the dew heater to stop dew from building up.  I guess we’ll try again when the weather is clear again.