Seeing better in the dark..

[rwilkinson]

.. without eating a lot of carrots?

Last night I was testing a new piece of hardware for observing and imaging.
Although it's not specifically designed for astro work, I did manage to find the M81 & M82 galaxies and Comet Johnson in my eyepeice, in twilight from central Bolton!

And I could even capture these images from a fixed tripod (i.e. no tracking!):

The Ursa Major galaxy-pair.

m8182.png (49.07 KiB) Viewed 5968 times

Comet 2015 V2 Johnson on 20-May. The nearby bright star is Delta Bootis.

c2015v2_20may.png (72.36 KiB) Viewed 5968 times

In each case, it took just 20 seconds to capture the raw data (and then a few minutes' processing with IRIS the following morning).

So I'm looking forward to trying it from a darker site (although at this time of year we get "Twilight All Night" and no proper darkness anyway).

If you want to know more, there will be a full write-up in our next newsletter.