New Forest Observatory ®

It was clear again last night, but as the Moon was beginning to get more intrusive I only intended to work on the collimation of camera5 (200mm lens). However, after getting the best collimation I could, it felt a shame to waste good imaging time so I went to get even more data on Arcturus.

So the above image is a composite of 2025-04-16 data of 24 subs @ 5-mins per sub, 2026-04-18 data of 18 subs @ 250 secs per sub, and finally last night’s 2026-04-22 data of 30 subs @ 4-mins per sub. That’s a grand total of 72 subs and 5 hours and 15-minutes of total integration time. The background is glassy smooth and the stars look great. So Arcturus should really be considered done on the 200mm array.

Another clear evening last night (we’ve had a good run this last week) and I got 13 x 10-minute subs with the 200mm lenses on the M106 region. If I make a 2-framer out of this by getting the frame on the left as well I will also get La Superba in the frame! Sounds like a project. However 13 subs is not enough for a nice smooth background, so I need to get more on M106 itself. A new one for me can be seen bottom left – this is the Box galaxy NGC4449, not imaged that one before so I got an unexpected bonus.

I need to get that 3rd 200mm lens up and running ASAP so that I can get all the necessary data down in one evening (like I used to do with the Sky90s). Now if I could only have 5 x 200mm lenses running at the same time.

A beautiful, completely clear, Moonless night last night, and warm as well!

I imaged from 10 p.m. until 1:15 a.m. with the 200mm lenses and 2600MC Pro Cmos cameras.

Two targets:

1. A star field in Ursa Major.
2. Arcturus.

The star field in Ursa Major did not look anything like it appeared on the Sky6, so I won’t be showing it here. Arcturus on the other hand with 18 x 250-second subs turned out quite nicely. Last night’s data is shown above and now I will go away and look for all the other Arcturus data taken on the 200mm lenses and see if I can put it all together.

Fired up the 2 x 200mm lenses and 2600MC Pro CMOS cameras last night. Started at astronomical darkness (now 10:00 p.m.!!!) and finished when the mount hit the Meridian and also cloud started rolling in from the West at 12:30 a.m.

Only 10 x 15-minute subs in total, but that was enough to give a reasonably noise-free background.

It was clear from last night’s outing that I am on the point of needing to replace all the old computers in the North Dome (that’s 5 of them) which is a bit of a pain, but it’s been on the cards for a while now.

The collimation by the way was PERFECT for both lenses last night, yes I got the magic 0,0,0 on CCDInspector. So all in all I was very pleased with last night’s session.