As my bio says, I’m a grad student in Space Studies at the University of North Dakota. I’ve taken classes on several topics, and this semester my classes are Extraterrial Resources and Observational Astronomy.
As part of the Astronomy course, we will be using the internet controlled telescope at the UND observatory. Last night was my practice session. We had a few equipement problems, but I did manage to get one Ok image. It’s of M71, a loose globular cluster about 13,000 light years away.
The image is a 15 second exposure using the observatory’s 16-inch LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and an SBIG STL-6303e CCD. It was taken at about 10:50 CDT on 9/9/06. All the settings were default, with no processing done on the image.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Doug Patterson // Sep 11, 2006 at 2:31 pm
Nice first image! Do y’all have a filter wheel for the camera, too?
2 Walt // Sep 11, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Ya know Doug, I have no idea! I’ll check on that later, maybe tonight in class.
3 Doug Patterson // Sep 12, 2006 at 8:44 pm
If you do, it would be neat to see some color images.
I don’t know if your skies are good enough to do standard photometry up there or not, but it would be neat if you could get enough color data on a star to determine temperatures. I know we can’t do that do any degree of certainty down here in Kansas and Missouri. We can do differential photometry, but the skies are generally too hazy for anything else, even in winter. Up in ND, you may have drier air, especially in winter.
4 Walt // Sep 19, 2006 at 6:47 pm
Looks like we can do color - I don’t know how yet, but if/when I get that info and time on the scope, I’ll see what I can come up with.
5 M71 Image - Post Processing · LordKingSquirrel.com // Oct 9, 2006 at 9:32 pm
[...] Last month I posted a preliminary image of M71 taken by me using the UND Space Studies Internet Telescope. This was just a first run using the observatory, and was not meant for anything special. But I thought that I’d process the image a little bit and see what it looked like. [...]
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