Star Vistas

Fred Clarke (Arthur C Clarke’s brother who lives in the S.W. of England) has two copies of Star Vistas destined to go into a new museum Fred is creating to house Sir Arthur C Clarke’s work.  When Sir Arthur kindly wrote the Foreword to Star Vistas I gently bribed him with two copies of the book when published.  Sadly Sir Arthur died just a few months before publication.  I then contacted his brother Fred who said he would gladly take charge of the copies and that in due course they would be placed in a new museum dedicated to Sir Arthur’s work.  I wish Fred good fortune in managing this mammoth task!

Within the last week there has been two large surges in sales of Star Vistas in the U.K. and one large surge in sales in the States.  We are not sure what caused these sudden increases in sales (a review somewhere perhaps?) – but whatever it is due to – thank you for continuing to purchase our first portfolio of  high-quality deep-sky images!!

Another one for Star Vistas II.  We had a slightly smaller version (smaller FOV) in SVI, so I got some more data and took a 2-framer of the region using the Sky 90 and SXVF-M25C.  Data was in RGB, H-alpha and H-beta, and totals around 40-hours exposure time.  A similar amount of image processing time was spent on this one by Noel.  So with no further ado, the Parker/Carboni double team bring you a stunning Orion panorama

We have recently seen a big kick in sales of Star Vistas in America that seems to have been prompted by a mini-review in Sky and Telescope magazine written by Sean Walker.  Thank you Sean   All publicity is welcome!

A few weeks back Greg captured galaxy M106 at the New Forest Observatory – this was at the time the supernova was still clearly visible   Noel has just processed this image and we present it to you now – hot off the press.  The beautiful Mother-of-Pearl galaxy M106 lies in Canes Venatici just below the handle of the Plough (Big Dipper).

There was a big surge in sales of Star Vistas in America just over a week ago, and over this weekend in Canada.  This corresponds to the release of the Star Vistas review in the American publication Sky & Telescope.  This also shows the power of advertising!!

We received our first less-than-stellar review today on one of the online bookstore sites…  It’s proven to be a bit of a growing experience as we watch our beloved book, which we worked so hard to create, make its way throughout the world.

While we realize we can’t please all the people all the time, we’re also taking this bit of feedback as a personal challenge to make the sequel to Star Vistas even more spectacular!

I have been following closely the rankings on Amazon (U.K., U.S.A., and Canada) and it appears that Star Vistas is still selling very well indeed :)  For some reason we hit a peak in America this weekend – maybe somebody has seen the collectable potential in our publication and placed a bulk order??

I am also happy to announce that we now are at the 50% mark for the number of entirely new images acquired from the New Forest Observatory ready for our next publication – Star Vistas II   Hopefully the end of 2009, beginning of 2010 should see the completion of image acquisition for SVII.

The talk at Southampton University on the 1st April went very well and the few copies of Star Vistas I had sold out  

Tomorrow (16/04/09) I will be on a local radio station and have no idea of the format – tune in from 8:00 until 9:00 a.m. to hear what happens.

I will be giving a PowerPoint presentation at the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) event at the University of Southampton, Physics building, on 1st April 2009.  There will also be telescopes available for your use, both observational and imaging!!  I shall bring along just 5 copies of Star Vistas for signing, so be quick to get in line if you’d like to buy one.  The event runs from 7:00 p.m.