The 20" Danish telescope at La Silla in the Chilean Andes was recently decommissioned and was to be mothballed or removed. Some of the Chilean amateurs got permission to attach an imaging system to this scope and thus the instrument was spared from the wrecker's ball.
It is a very old instrument which had a simple Dall-Kirkham design that had tons of coma off-axis, which made it unsuitable for imaging. It was used only with a slit spectroscope, so it didn't need a field of view.
I recently made a special coma corrector and the guys down there attached it to the scope. It is not perfectly aligned yet and needs some tweaking, but this first light image shows potential for capturing very faint galaxies in pristine seeing.
Scope - 20" F15 Danish D-K Cassegrain
Camera - STL11K
Exposure - single 50 second RGB
Rolando
It is a very old instrument which had a simple Dall-Kirkham design that had tons of coma off-axis, which made it unsuitable for imaging. It was used only with a slit spectroscope, so it didn't need a field of view.
I recently made a special coma corrector and the guys down there attached it to the scope. It is not perfectly aligned yet and needs some tweaking, but this first light image shows potential for capturing very faint galaxies in pristine seeing.
Scope - 20" F15 Danish D-K Cassegrain
Camera - STL11K
Exposure - single 50 second RGB
Rolando
Attached Image:
