While at a dark site in NM I took my deepest image ever. Naturally, I aimed at the Ursa Major location of the "Hubble Deep Field" image. Using my NP101is 4" refractor and ST-8300M camera I took 12 subexposures of 6 minutes each for 72 minutes of total exposure time.
The image is very cool for what it shows. I've annotated several very dim galaxies that are as faint at 18th magnitude. I could find distances for some of them... as much as 1.7 Gly away! There are dozens of additional faint fuzzies in the picture that I haven't identified yet.
But the image is even more amazing for what it doesn't show. As deep an image as it is, the HDF area is still virtually blank. The Hubble Space Telescope and its team are truly amazing.
Rick Young
June 24, 2011
0 comments:
Post a Comment