1004X EX-VIEW LONG EXPOSURE ASTRO CAMERA

Wide Field Image looking North

7th Sept 2002

Standard board camera wide angle lens (10mm aperture!) 21x 10sec

I took this image with the 1004x JG using the standard camera board lens. (no IR filter) The camera was propped outside on the window ledge at an angle of about 60deg. The image is an average of 21 x10sec frames, corrected for dark and flat frames in K3CCD,de-rotated using Photoshop and stacked using K3CCD. The final image was stretched, slightly blurred and unshap masked and reduced to 2/3. The flat field mainly corrects for vignetting and was a short exposure taken during the day through a piece of paper. I could not use cooling because the lens would not stay dew free so the darks were quite noisy, causing the black pixels in the final image.

The image is centred on about 01h:30m RA 63deg Dec and is about 60deg square. The milky way runs almost vetically through the image. Polaris is the bright star at the left centre and M31 is visible at the top right edge at about 2 o'clock. (The dark corner is the roof of the house)