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Pictures are thumbnails - click on a picture to enlarge - use "back" on the browser to return The following few pictures were taken at Kitt Peak National Optical Observatory overnight 11/22/97 - 11/23/97 as part of the Advanced Amateur Observing program. I spent the night one-on-one with a professional astronomer and a 16" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope complete with CCD camera, in a dome, under the darkest skies I have ever seen. Arizona is the astronomy capitol of the world. Their scope is the same model as mine, but theirs is 16" diameter, mine is 8". Kitt Peak is 56 miles southwest of Tuscon, 6,875 feet up, and is the largest optical observatory in the world with 23 telescopes up to 4.0 meter diameter. These pictures were also published on the advanced observor's web page of the NOAO.
M-42 - The Great Orion Nebula. 15 minute exposures of Red, Green, and Blue combined. Taken with a SBIG - ST7 CCD camera attached to a 16" Meade LX-200 Schmidt-Cassegrain with a focal reducer, operating at f/6.3. Taken at Kitt Peak, AZ 11/23/97 by Tom Miller.
Here's another shot of the Orion Nebula taken with my CCD camera and 8" SCT from my back yard December 16th, 1998. Note the orientation is opposite of the preceeding shot.
My LX-200 8" that took the preceeding shot from my back yard.
NGC-2438 a "doughnut" nebula. 15 minute exposures of Red, Green, and Blue combined. Same conditions as above.
NGC-253 - The Sculptor galaxy - One of over 30,000 galaxies we know of, each containing millions of stars ! Now, new pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope indicate there may be as many as 125 billion galaxies in the Universe. This galaxy is magnitude 7, meaning it is invisible to the naked eye.
M-51 - The "Whirlpool Galaxy" - This object was so large with the 16" telescope that it's companion galaxy would not fit on the CCD plane. The exposure was 10 minutes with the CCD at f/6.3. I had planned on photographing the Andromeda Galaxy, but it is much too large for this format, even at home with my 8" scope. M-51 is located near the last star in the handle of the Big Dipper.
This is called the "Owl Nebula" (M-97) If you look carefully, you can see dark spots that resemble the eyes of an owl. A 12th maginitude planetary nebula, 1300 light years away.
M-27 - "The Dumbell Nebula"
An overexposed Jupiter showing 4 of her moons. It is necessary to overexpose Jupiter to reveal her four visible moons. This picture was taken from my back yard with my 8" Meade LX-200 and a Pentax body. This picture was taken 10/29/97. The moons from lower left to upper right are Europa, Io, Ganymede, and Callisto.
Here's a closer look at Jupiter from my backyard with my 8" LX200 and a 416XT Camera.
Saturn through the 16" LX-200 at Kitt Peak.
The moon rose about 4:00 am, and after that, it was so bright that there was little else to look at except the moon. These exposures are very much shorter than those of the deep space objects. This one was the shortest possible with the CCD camera, 0.11 second with an aperature filter on the scope, and a dark blue filter on the camera. The moon is a very bright object, as are Saturn and Jupiter. The crater below center with the spectacular white surround is Kepler. It is 22 miles in diameter. The darker crater in the upper right is Copernicus. More Moon pictures follow:
Hale-Bopp comet at dusk near Bartlett Lake. The Pleiades are to the left of the comet. This picture was 20 second exposure on 400 speed film with a 35mm lens.
Kitt Peak Arizona - 56 miles southwest of Tucson, AZ. 6,875' high on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation. The Indians call the astronomers "the people with the long eyes".
The 16" LX-200 I used at Kitt Peak. This is the only one of the 23 telescopes on Kitt Peak that uses an eyepiece (which I chose not to use).
The 4.0 meter (157.5" diameter mirror) MAYALL reflecting telescope resides inside this dome at Kitt Peak. I took this picture near sunset. |
