Two new publications and observatory building renovations

A long term review of widefield imaging using a Samyang 135mm lens & DSLR

Raw data from SQM and weather station now available to download

Crowdsourcing data on cataclysmic variable SS Cyg

Celestron’s fork mount for the C11 is rock solid and very reliable. It was the work-horse for the last 3 years of observations. However for exposures longer than 30 - 60 seconds it gets unwieldy. Sometimes half of the exposures are thrown away and even then the good ones are not fantastic. The CEM120 from iOptron is a fairly new mount on the market with an unusual centre balanced design. A claimed ±3.5 arcsec periodic error, through the mount cabling and 52kg equipment capacity make it look really good on paper. So we went ahead and deforked the C11 and installed a CEM120.

Observation of exoplanet XO-2b on the night of January 8th 2018

OV Boo, a cataclysmic variable. Brightness drops every 60min + lots of flaring. Lucky we dont live near here! Multiple 1minute exposures taken From: 2017-04-01 21:00-23:00

A Jupyter Notebook to detect collimation problems

Activity seems very low. Some small meteors captured at the end of the video. Video ends at 1:15am IST on Aug 9th. Capture was made using an ZWO ASI120MM camera with a fish eye lens. This camera, which is normally used as the guide camera for the main telescope was temporarily attached to the observatory wall. FireCapture was used with 30sec exposures and 70% gain. Final processing in iMovie.

Image taken 2016-01-16T21:13

2 Images of extragalactic nova 2015-12b in M33, 10 days apart.