The last of Summer

 

The summer constellation Cygnus, like Frodo, is disappearing in the west earlier each night, as autumn fades into winter. This image is a crop from a wider stack of frames taken earlier in the summer using the Canon 600d DSLR with an EF -S 18-55 lens at f=18mm all on the Star Adventurer equatorial mount. Credit: Kurt Thrust, Pip Stakkert. and Reginald Stax (astro-student at the JPO)

" Since the night of the 20th of September, the weather in Lowestoft has been exceptionally inclement! Between broken cloud and rain showers, we managed to glimpse the Harvest Moon close to the very bright and 'pink' planet Mars. . We are hoping that the weather will improve in order that we may capture some more images of Mars using the Observatory's large refractor. 

To keep the team busy Joel Cairo has been encouraging our sponsors Anita and George Roberts to provide the cash to purchase Topaz Denoise AI a software package capable of improving 'the signal to noise ratio' in the Observatory's images.  Pip and Reggie have been helping me to evaluate the software using a trial download. The above image was processed using Topaz Denoise AI (the AI stands for Artificial Intelligence - we can do with a bit of that around here). The stars Deneb, Sadr , Delta Cygni and Epsilon Cygni are well displayed. The North America Nebula NGC7000 is clearly visible. We also tried Denoise AI on a planetary image of Saturn. We are quite impressed with this software and hope the JPO budget can stretch to purchasing it!" - Kurt Thrust  current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory