Hi all,
Just arrived back in the USA from 4 weeks observing back home in Oz.
Most of my time I was busy doing photometry, however I had some time to experiment using narrow-band filters I had just purchased to get some "pretty pictures" of some familiar and some not-so-familiar southern objects. Here are a few that I have processed so far. I will post others as I get to them.
In addition to the CCD imaging, I also had time for film photography and visual observing with 80mm binoculars. Of the 22 nights I was at the observatory, only one was totally lost to cloud, and most were totally clear. However on many nights there were strong winds blowing which kicked up a lot of dust, reducing the naked-eye limiting magnitude to only 7.4, except for a few nights following the cloudy night which also brought some light rain which settled the dust resulting in a limiting magnitude of 7.6 - 7.7.
The highlight of the trip however was a visit by a friend from the Perth Observatory. He brought up their new 30" obsession. You have never lived until you have seen things like omigosh centauri, NGC 5128, or eta carina near the zenith under very dark skies with a very large telescope!!!!!!!!!
Enjoy the images.
Cheers,
Maurice
The image below is of NGC 1763, an emission nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is a combination of 10, 3 minute exposures with an H-alpha filter using a 300mm f/6 newtonain.
Just arrived back in the USA from 4 weeks observing back home in Oz.
Most of my time I was busy doing photometry, however I had some time to experiment using narrow-band filters I had just purchased to get some "pretty pictures" of some familiar and some not-so-familiar southern objects. Here are a few that I have processed so far. I will post others as I get to them.
In addition to the CCD imaging, I also had time for film photography and visual observing with 80mm binoculars. Of the 22 nights I was at the observatory, only one was totally lost to cloud, and most were totally clear. However on many nights there were strong winds blowing which kicked up a lot of dust, reducing the naked-eye limiting magnitude to only 7.4, except for a few nights following the cloudy night which also brought some light rain which settled the dust resulting in a limiting magnitude of 7.6 - 7.7.
The highlight of the trip however was a visit by a friend from the Perth Observatory. He brought up their new 30" obsession. You have never lived until you have seen things like omigosh centauri, NGC 5128, or eta carina near the zenith under very dark skies with a very large telescope!!!!!!!!!
Enjoy the images.
Cheers,
Maurice
The image below is of NGC 1763, an emission nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is a combination of 10, 3 minute exposures with an H-alpha filter using a 300mm f/6 newtonain.
Attached Image:
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