I can't believe that I haven't updated this blog since March 2022 - how time flies. Unfortunately it's not been a very productive year mainly due to the long stretches of poor weather and opportunities only arising at inopportune moments.
The main thing that happened this year was that I bought a second hand Celestron NexStar 6SE telescope, a ZWO ASI 224 planetary camera, a ZWO atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) and a 2.5x PowerMate (Barlow) for planetary work and so that's what I've mainly focused on for much of the year. It's been another learning curve as planetary imaging is quite unlike deep sky imaging, but I have had some successes and I've managed to produce my best ever images of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. Still a lot of work to do there though.
In the last couple of months I've been very fortunate to have had the loan of a William Optics WhiteCat 51 widefield telescope off my friend and fellow L.A.S. member Mark Hellaby, who has very kindly let me borrow it for quite a while now as he focuses on other projects in his newly built observatory. I was mainly hoping to put it to good use at a 'Star Party' in darkest Dumfries and Galloway in November, but very poor weather meant I only managed one night of imaging and one target, Andromeda (shown here). However, since returning home I have had a few more sessions with it in my back garden and improved my existing images of several widefield deep sky objects.
So, without more ado, I'll set about updating this blog with images I've taken since March and I'll be putting them in chronological order according to the dates I took them.
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