Looking up at a Chinese night sky Confucius poetically said: “Stars are holes in the sky from which the light of the infinite shines.” Scientifically, we now know that the stars are actually giant balls of hydrogen converting to helium in a nuclear fusion process and kicking out huge amounts of heat, light, plasma, particles and radiation in the process. But is our Sun a “normal” size and “type” of star and how does it compare…

by Dean Ashton, April 2024 There are many examples where we image an object that is predominantly a full continuumspectrum object, a galaxy or a reflection nebula for example, but it also contains emissionline nebulae components. Capturing both a full spectrum RGB image and narrowbandemission image which are then combined may reveal more information about the objectand create a more interesting and complete image. With so many new advances in Pixinsight processing methods, one…

You will probably have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope. It has orbited our planet 333 miles up since 1990 and has spectacularly opened up our view of the Universe with many beautiful images and discoveries. It was named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. He fought in the Great War and when he returned in 1919, Hubble joined the Mount Wilson Observatory with its 100-inch mirror Hooker Telescope that was the most powerful…

Last month ( February) solar observers had a real treat observing the largest Sunspot group of the current solar cycle No25 . Peter Meadows of the BAA Solar section wrote “In addition to producing 3 X-flares over the last day or so, sunspot group AR 13590 is also the largest of this cycle so far. Today (23rd Feb) it reached an area of 1800 millionths of the Sun’s visible hemisphere (MSH). It is an…

It’s been a while since the club did an imaging workshop. Back then, no-one had ever heard of a CMOS sensor and all the big boy camera manufacturers like SBIG, Starlight Express, and Atik were only making huge pixeled mono only CCD sensors. The Skywatcher EQ5 mount was the imaging mount of choice – unless you could afford something from Software Bisque or Astrophysics. The tracking wasn’t great, so you had to use a…

JWST Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Through his telescope In March 1781, the astronomer William Herschel noticed an object appearing as a disk and not a star and found it to be a new planet beyond the orbit of Saturn. He had discovered the Ice Giant planet Uranus which became the outermost of the seven known planets in our solar system.  Thirty seven years after Herschel’s discovery, poor tenant farmers Thomas and Tabitha Adams…