Despite the cold and cloudy weather at the end of the term, the intrepid observers of the Astro 113 Fall 2000 class persisted in their quest for cosmic sights. They captured these lovely celestial images with CCD cameras connected to their telescopes. Enjoy!
Planets
This fine view of Saturn was captured by Mark Lickteig, Jesse Newman and Phil Spindler. They combined a 0.03 sec red image, a 0.05 sec green image and a 0.09 sec image of Saturn to produce this colorful picture of the ringed planet.
Sara Karbeling and Chrissie Phelps chose two different exposure times to reveal the mighty planet Jupiter encircled by its moons. Their short 0.01 sec exposure at left reveals the coloful bands in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.
Chrissie and Sara also captured a 0.5 sec exposure to show Jupiter and the four Galilean moons. The moons in order, from left to right, are Callisto, Europa, Io and Ganymede.
Nebulae
This planetary nebula is located in the constellation Lyra. It is known for its smoke-ring appearance through a telescope. Matt Hahn and Aniket Shah took this beautiful, well-focussed 10 second image of M57.
Danielle Henkle and Jeanne Mills caught a spectacular view of the Ring Nebula on their first night of imaging! The image is a stack of 20 second red, green and blue images and it displays the Ring’s characteristic color gradient. Notice the stars also show some of their intrinsic colors.
Sara Karbeling and Chrissie Phelps captured an awesome image of M42, that great star-forming nebula in Orion. (It’s really the “central star” in the sword of Orion.) After a very cold evening of imaging, they managed to miraculously center M42 in the field of view and grab three final images. We think this great good fortune was because Sara promised to send her grandmother an image, so we’ve called it “Grandma’s Miracle”! This image is a combined set of 3 sec red, green and blue images and it clearly reveals the gas and dust surrounding the recently formed bright Trapezium stars.