V838 Monocerotis "light-echo" images morphed into nice video, but why so few original images? This NYTimes video shows what I think is a series of real Hubble images which have been "morphed" artistically to appear to be continuously expanding. (also see The V838 Monocerotis Star Still Has Astronomers’ Heads Exploding) If I understand correctly it is the light-echo, not actual material that is doing the expanding at this rate. They also give four discrete images available in 2006 (shown below) and you can find a link to a video there which also seems to be made of just four images.

This is (very roughly speaking) tomography of the cloud - the parabolic "shell of reflection" expands and each image highlights a view of the material in that shell. That seems to be what the diagram illustrates.

my question is: why weren't there more images taken of this - technically speaking - awesome event, enough to make an animation without the artistic "morphing"? 

note: I'm not asking "why do you think there weren't...". I'm looking for the actual reason. Are these "found images" - nobody thought of doing it and later just pulled these from archives, or where these thought to be sufficient? Are there more images available?

Here are some links to video I have found

YouTube:
"Hubble: Timelapse of V838 Monocerotis (2002-2006)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1fvMSs9cps

...which can also be seen at spacetelescope.org

http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic0617a/

... and this Wikipedia article links to this video

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Evolution_of_the_light_echo_around_V838_Monocerotis_%28Heic0617a%29.ogv

and here are some "stills"

Images from NYTimes
To get time on the Hubble Space Telescope is a difficult, peer-reviewed process. The time is usually about ten times oversubscribed. The scientific justification to get more images must be more than "it would make a nice movie".

The submission of proposals for HST time is a confidential process; so I don't know whether the principal investigators for these images asked for more at different epochs and were turned down, or whether they thought this many images were sufficient for the science they wanted to accomplish.

There is no technical reason why they couldn't have obtained more images. In fact more images were obtained (see this link to the Hubble archive) at later epochs between 2005 and 2012. A problem I guess with incorporating these images into the movie sequence were that the light echo gets fainter, more diffuse and starts to exceed the size of the detector, which would necessitate more than one pointing. They were also taken with a different camera, which might raise aesthetic compatibility problems. I show below a fairly crude colour composite I extracted from the archive for an observation in 2007.