Fred Lehman
This was the first clear evening in what seems like forever, and it
even occurred on the day of a scheduled outing -- amazing. I arrived
on the scene just as the sun was dipping behind the distant treetops,
and I was surprised to find the parking lot completely packed with cars.
I parked off to the side and walked down to talk with the two park
rangers who seemed to be in charge of the rather large crowd of patrons.
I learned that the rangers were about to lead the group on an hour-long
sunset to darkness sojourn through the Everglades. I told them
I would be setting up my telescope and when they returned I would treat
them to a complementary tour of the night sky. I had just completed my
polar alignment when they suddenly reappeared on the scene. All of them
enjoyed looking at the assorted clusters and nebula, but I'm afraid that
for many of them my bright green laser pointer was the most interesting
part of my presentation.
Eventually the crowd dissipated and I was able to get down to the business
of capturing a few more luscious pictures of the night sky. Most of the
bright emission nebulae of the Winter Milky Way are already too low in the
west to be suitable targets, and the multitude of goodies in the Summer
Milky Way won't be up for a couple more months, so I spent the night
shooting clusters and a few galaxies. Here are the six pictures I managed
to click off before my batteries all went dead.
SXVF-M25C on an LX200-14 @ f/1.95 |
Open Cluster M46 in Puppis
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Open Cluster NGC2477 in Puppis
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Spiral Galaxy M106 in Canes Venatici
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Edge-on Galaxy NGC4565 in Coma Bernices
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Globular Cluster M3 in Canes Venatici
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Globular Cluster NGC5139 Omega Centauri
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Due to its very low altitude above the southern horizon, the photo of
Omega Centauri required special special processing to correct for the
prismatic effects of the Earth's atmosphere. To do this I first split the
raw stacked FITS file into separate R, G, and B images. The RED image was
re-sampled with a vertical offset of +1/3 pixel (shifting it up) and the
BLUE image was re-sampled with a vertical offset of -1/4 pixel (shifting
it down). The GREEN frame was left unchanged and the three colors were then
re-combined into a single RGB image again. Since I shot the picture at the
meridian crossing there was no need to apply an X-axis color convergence.
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