I got another image of this comet last night. It's now up to 9th magnitude, and moving quickly through Andromeda.
So quickly that I had to re-point my 'scope mid-way through the imaging run!

Last night for once, whilst it was cloudy in Spain and New Mexico, the skies were clear in Bolton!
So I set up a little imaging system pointing through an upstairs window, to catch the comets as they cleared the tall trees in the Park:

I've just got an image from an iTelescope in New Mexico: 260P is the one near the centre of this field.
This time I was operating the telescope "live", rather than waiting to get the data back from a pre-submitted job.

This weekend there will be a "conjunction" of two comets: 260P/McNaught and C/2018 N2 (ASASSN) in the constellation of Aries . At their closest (during the afternoon of the 7th) they appear within 10 arc-minutes of each other, but they remain within half a degree through the previous and following n...

IRIS uses "signed 16-bit" numbers, i.e. between -32726 and +32767. so you're saturating in the G & B channels. So you must use the "Normalise" process: this automatically re-scales the totals to prevent saturation. And you could try boosting the Red channel using the RGB Balance panel, or the >RGBB...

bchamberlain wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 25, 2019 10:59 am

The BG in iris reads 2820 which seems a bit high.

Could that be just down to the high ambient temperature?
My imaging session on Saturday night produced a number of hot-pixels from my Mx716 camera which I hadn't seen before!

Last night I went out to set up my C8 'scope and mount, to have a look for Comet Africano . I had a false-start: after setting up my tripod and doing a polar alignment, I realised that there was a tree in the way of my target! Eventually I had to move the green wheelie-bin to make space to set up wi...

Here's another gem from the early years of manned space-flight: a (black & white) edition of Horizon from May 1966: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01z4mj0/horizon-19651966-man-in-space It includes a tour of the Gemini capsule, and interviews with Frank Borman and Walt Cunningham . And the ye...

The last episode is a live forum recorded at Rice University, Texas (the site of President Kennedy's historic speech) : https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz534 This includes Apollo 7 astronaut Walt Cunningham and Mission Controllers Gerry Griffin and John Aaron giving their recollections of the da...

The night before our launches, I'd met up with Gary Hawkins, an old friend on holiday from San Diego (you may recall that a couple of years ago he wrote an article for our newsletter about his experiences with an 8" Dobsonian in California). I'd told him about our planned rocket-night, and then sent...