I have placed on the Project NGC page a new copy of PDF documents, updated on the 24th March 2009.
The PDF documents are effectively books of hundreds of images of NGC objects, grouped by RA Hour and sequenced by Magnitude. I started producing these books when people wanted a copy of my NGC images and I realised what benefit they could be to amateur astronomers.
The new NGC book (as 2 files) contains 1503 objects, several hundred more than the preivous ones from December.
I have had a somewhat forced pause in my attempt to photograph all NGC objects lately by way of my RoboFocus unit becoming problematic. The RoboFocus is overheating periodoically, on about one in five nights. The RoboFocus is required to operate in the automation such that refocus can occur at regular intervals throughout the night. At the moment the risk of damaging the unit is too high to use it, so activities are currently paused.
It's interesting that having now got my observatory running to a nice level of automation, doing a night of attended photograhy where I would spend say 3 hours out there before closing up the shed and going to bed, seems not worthwhile. It's hard to convince myself to do that when I know that once the RoboFocus (and hence automation) is all running again I will get 8 hours of exposures for 30 minutes of effort. Perhaps proof that I'm becoming even more lazy! Must be old age.
See the latest Project NGC documents here
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