On December 21, 2008, I went on a short observing session, which was hautned by several problems with my setup. However, I did manage to pull off a picture of M1, aka the Crab Nebula, with my Vixen refractor and my Canon EOS 350D digital reflex. This object is just a smudge of light of about 7 x 5 arcminutes across, so it's really small compared with the whole frame, which I had to heavily crop. Here is the result:


Some info on the picture: Vixen ED103 SWT refractor, Canon EOS 350D DSLR, 11 x 10-minute individual exposures, 3 dark frames, autoguiding with the MagZero MZ-5m and an 80-mm guide scope. Processing done with DeepSkyStacker and Adobe Photoshop CS3. Zenital sky brightness measured with SQM-L: 20.60.
This shot is plagued by quite a few defects (namely, bad focusing and tracking), but it can make do as my first attempt at shooting M1. More (and hopefully better ones) will come!

Ok, I know: I should have written this post more than a month ago. But I’ve been very busy lately and I have to process my backlog of work, including new updates to this website. After all, they say “better late than never”...
So, here we go: the 2008 edition of the Devoxx conference (formely JavaPolis: by the way, why the heck did Sun have this name changed?) was held (as usual) in Antwerp, Belgium, from December 10th to 12th, after the two-day Devoxx University.
This was my second time at Devoxx, after 2006 when I had managed to take part as a speaker (having held a BoF together with my ol’ pal Fabrizio Giudici ).

Click on the link below for the full report.