Welcome to 2024!

 New Year, New Post.

Hello, and welcome to 2024!  And what better way to start the new year with a post of the latest image.  My 2023 astronomy activities were a little on the low side for a number of reason but generally, the weather just seemed to always be against me.  That, coupled together with a bout of technical issues in the observatory saw some very frustrating times when clear skies did eventually present themselves.  Following a ground up rebuild of the observatory PC, those technical issues were finally overcome and I am now happy to report that I am back in the driving seat and in the position where I can be up and running within about 10 minutes of rolling the roof back.

I managed to snatch about 2 1/2 hours of clear sky over the Christmas and New Year period, so I set about re-visiting a target which I thought I had imaged before (but I can't find any record of it oddly), The Elephant's Trunk nebula.  The relief of just being able to switch everything on to get up and running was huge and contributed a lot towards getting the imaging mojo back.

Alas though, they were only the first challenges of producing my latest images.  I use PixInsight for my image processing and it seems so long again since I processed data that I found myself needing to relearn many of the steps.  Now, the thing with PI is that it is so well developed, that there are always new features and improvements to tools being added via updates to the programme.  Combined with new tools and scripts being made available by the wider PI user community, it often means that after a period of time not using the software, often I find myself having to produce a new processing work flow.  This was most certainly the case this time around, and will probably be the topic of another post in the not too distant future...

Anyway, onto the main point of this post, the final image.  So, here it is.  IC 1396, the Elephant's Trunk nebula found in the constellation of Cepheus.  It's only around 2400 light years away, so pretty close in the scheme of things.