Since it’s still cloudy and raining I went back to my last RGB set for M27 and using the new Hα data came up with this composite. The RGB was a little thin but better than I remembered.

I finished installing my new AAG Cloud Watcher. This is a really cool device that uses IR thermometry to determine when the sky is cloudy or clear. I put in a new 4×4 post next to the observatory to install the sensor on. I ran a 1-1/2″ electrical conduit from the observatory to the top of the post and capped it with a rain hood. I’m planning to eventually use this same post for a weather station and an all-sky camera so I wanted it to be easy to run more cables in the future.

The unit connects to my observatory PC via serial port and a Windows driver manages collecting data. I can connect to this driver with my observatory automation software in order to stop an imaging session and shutdown my observatory in the event of clouds or rain. This is the graphical display,

The weather has not been very cooperative lately but I did manage to grab about 6 1/2 hours of Hα filtered data from M27. I plan to collect some new RGB data for an hα-RGB combo. I stretched this pretty hard to show the outer gas halo.

I have completed conversion of my astrophoto gallery to the new website format this week. There are at least four nice effects of this update,

• The Astrophoto Gallery link on the right takes you to a page that is within the header and side bars of the site and thus maintains the theme.
• Clicking on an image in the gallery takes you to a page that shows a medium sized version of the image with all of the image meta data that I used to show on my old pages.
• Clicking on the image on the image data page will bring up an image that scales with your browser size up to a maximum of 1280 pixels wide. If you require a larger image for inspection or a desktop background then just ask.
• And, best of all, typing something like “M31″ in the search box at the top right of the site will bring up all images or posts of M31!

I went back and reprocessed M15 from the beginning and used CCDStack this time to do the image registration.  This  fixed the RGB alignment issues that I was having earlier.

Welcome to my new Astrophotography blog!  I decided it was time to overhaul the old site.  It’s still a work in progress and you’ll find that there is a mix of the old and new site mingled together. If you want to keep up with this blog you can use the links to the right to sign up to receive email when a new posting is added or use the RSS feed with your Google or Yahoo desktop.