Stephen's Quintet

It's almost 4AM here at the observatory, and we are starting to wrap things up. Once we obtained our goal of photographing M13 (see previous post), I asked to see if we can grab an image of Stephen's Quintet. This sweet collection of galaxies can be found in the Pegasus Constellation. From our location in Twin Falls, ID our target was pretty close to the Zenith, so we didn't seem to have trouble.

The final jpeg was shot in B&W, and can be grabbed here.

We did 25 exposures at 90 seconds each.

2010.07.19 - Seeking to Capture M13

l folks,

Ken Thomason and I are sitting here at the Centennial Observatory, grabbing some images of M13, the globular cluster in Hercules. Doing astro-photography is a lot harder than I originally thought!

Currently we are using a MaximDL4 software with an Apogee 47E CCD camera on a 24 inch research grade telescope made by DFM Engineering, Inc. We do have MaximDL5, but we have not had the chance nor time to sit down and really play with it.

The parameters we are setup with are:

CLEAR - 40sec Exposure - 25 images

RED - 48sec Exposure - 10 Images

GREEN - 60sec Exposure - 10 Images

BLUE - 108sec Exposure - 10 Images

Combining the upload time, this project should take us just over an hour to capture, and maybe another half-hour to compile all the images together in order to obtain our final image.

If it turns out halfway decent, I'll post the image later!

It is now.... later! And here is our final image.