[Jon (Jonathan)]

This one needs a story.

As a child in the 1970s, I loved astronomy and space. It wasn't until I was 20, in 1986, that I was able to get a telescope. If you were alive then ;-) you will remember that 1986 was all about Halley fever. So in April 1986 I finally got a telescope - a modest 5" Newtonian - and with my reference materials (a newspaper article on Halley, a planisphere, and a Patrick Moore book on astronomy that I'd had for years) pointed my new treasure eagerly at where Halley was supposed to be.

Amazing! The eyepiece was filled with a glorious shperical burst of light. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I looked harder at the image - interesting that the diffuse cometary halo semed to resolve into individual points of light ... And no sign of a tail, but then I had heard that this visit of Halley was disappointing. What I was seeing was anything but disappointing. But the longer I looked, the less it looked like what a comet was supposed to look like.

Well, eventually I realised that I was a few degrees off, and what I was looking at was Omega Centauri. Amazing! I was looking for this comet, but was the sky really full of unexpected treasures? I started to slew the scope around (in those days, "slew" was something we did by hand) and came across something that literally took my breaht away. I stopped breathing. There was a little pocket of gems in the sky that Aladdin had left behind. A sparkle of red, blue and green (I'm SURE I remmeber green!) stars in a tiny little treasure-chest just below the Southern Cross.

It was the Jewel Box, and it hooked my into the delights of the sky in a way that has lasted a lifetime.

So, nearly 30 years later, when I finally fulfilled a lifetime's ambition and acquired a new telescope and acmera, and after three months of technical bedding in during which I finally got autoguiding working, there was only one object I could possibly capture.

Meade 10" SCT, F/10, with a Canon EOS 60Da. Next time I'll go for it with my focal reducer to F/6.7, which will enhance the sense of this little treasure of gems secretly buried in the deep south of the sky.

[EDIT - I got that F/6.7 shot last night. Attached. I need to do a better job with the flats I have to get rid of the vignetting at this focal ratio - but it's a steep learning curve, and I'm going one step at a time!]

10x2' exposures, ISO 800.

Thanks for reading this far in the nostalgic musings of a lifetime star addict :-)