These images have been selected from those recorded with the 20-inch Corrected Dall Kirkham telescopes at Mt. Kent in Southern Queensland, Australia, and at Moore Observatory, in Kentucky.
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John Kielkopf, University of Louisville, unless otherwise noted.
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Comet 17P/Holmes on the nights of (right) October 29 and (left) 30 (UT) in images taken with the Louisville CDK20. North is up and west to the right. Each frame is 3 minutes of arc wide. The two exposures are separated in time by approximately 24 hours. Notice that the coma in the second image is larger than in the first, with an expansion rate of approximately 23 seconds of arc per day. Extrapolated backward, the event which gave rise to the sudden brightening of Comet Holmes would have occurred around October 24 when it was first noticed.
A test of the all sky video camera at Moore Observatory on the night of August 11, 2007. Click on the image for a movie spanning about 80 minutes from midnight to 1:20 AM. A Stellacam3 integrating video camera, an f/1.0 2.6 mm focal length lens, and an infrared filter to suppress OH night sky emission provide this nearly complete 180 degree live view of the sky from west on the left to east on the right. The camera output feeds an Axis video server that delivers video on the project website. In these test images the camera is aimed about 20 degrees below the zenith to the north. Ursa Major is setting behind the trees, Cygnus is nearly overhead, and Cassiopeia is rising in the east. The Milky Way is faintly visible through Cygnus. These images were recorded when the midwest was experiencing a record heat wave with highs nearly 100 F during the day and murky skies at night.
The Milky Way, first quarter Moon, and Venus at Mt. Kent on the night of May 21, 2007. This is a 30 second exposure with a Nikon D200 and a f/5.2 Coastal Optical Systems 4.88 mm focal length fisheye lens. The full resolution version here shows Alpha and Beta Centauri and the Southern Cross on the lower left in the south, Canis Major following Orion setting in the west on the right, Venus near the Moon in Gemini toward the northwest, and Saturn in Leo north of zenith.
Eta Carinae from a set of 1-second exposures on May 20, 2007 at Mt. Kent with the CDK20, an STL6303 CCD camera, and the I, R, and V-band photometric filters. The bands are displayed in this image as red, green and blue, respectively. Color layers were extracted with a gamma of 2.0 from the original 16-bit dark-subtracted images. The combined color image as shown here was subsequently processed with an unsharp mask to highlight detail in the nebula surrounding the star, with weaker signals non-linearly increased to show fainter features. This image shows 1024x768 pixels covering a field of 9.2'x6.9' from the center of the image. A full resolution 2048x3072 (0.306x0.459 degree) version is available here. Compare this image with the high resolution image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Carina and the Milky Way as recorded at Mt. Kent on May 23, 2007, in a 30 second exposure with a Nikon D200 and an 85 mm focal length f/1.4 Nikor lens used at f/2.0. The camera is mounted on the CDK20 to provide color images with a field of about 11x16 degrees revealing stars down to 11th magnitude. The image is centered on the supergiant star Eta Carinae. The full resolution version is available here. North is at the top and west at the right in these images, the same orientation as in the detailed image of Eta Carinae above from the CDK20. The large open cluster NGC 3532 is east of eta Carina left of center, and the smaller cluster NGC 3114 is on the western edge of the image slightly below center.
The Southern Cross (Crux) and the Coalsack Dark Nebula as recorded at Mt. Kent on May 23, 2007, in a 30 second exposure with a Nikon D200 and an 85 mm focal length f/1.4 Nikor lens used at f/2.0. The field is about 16x11 degrees. A full resolution version is available here. The images are centered on Gacrux, but the brightest star is Alpha at the bottom of the cross. The principle stars are Alpha (Acrux), Beta, Gamma (Gacrux) and Delta counterclockwise from the bottom. There is a naked eye fifth star, Epsilon, between Delta and Alpha. The five star pattern is featured on the Australian flag. A compact cluster NGC 4852 is slightly southeast of Beta. The Coalsack is the dark cloud largely devoid of distant stars southeast of the cross in the lower left of the image.
The globular star cluster Omega Centauri in a single 10-second R-band exposure on May 20, 2007, at Mt. Kent with the CDK20, an STL6303 CCD camera. North is up and west to the right in this image, which is scaled down 4x from the original size. It is displayed here with gamma=2.0 to stretch the visible dynamic range and reveal the fainter stars. A full resolution 2048x3072 (0.306x0.459 degree) version is available here. The brightest star in the image, north of center, is magnitude 8.4. It saturates the CCD's response at 10 seconds. Stars as faint as 18th magnitude are visible. Scan the full resolution image to see the quality of the corrected Dall Kirkham's performance to the edge of the field. While there was a nearly first quarter Moon when this image was recorded, the sky background is effectively zero in this short exposure.
An image of Jupiter in ultraviolet light was recorded in a 10 second exposure on April 2, 2007, 14:28 UTC at Mt. Kent with the CDK20, an STL6303 CCD camera, and a U-band photometric filter. Notice that the Great Red Spot is prominent south of the equator. The field of view in this 650x448 pixel image is 5.8x4.0 minutes of arc. A single pixel covers 0.537 seconds of arc, but atmospheric conditions limit the resolution to about 1 second of arc.
The image in this version is processed to show the four bright Galilean satellites. From left (east) to right they are Callisto, Io, Ganymede, and Europa. The field of view is 11.6x8.0 minutes of arc, reduced in size from the original by 2x.
Proxima Centauri, the nearest known star to our solar system, is shown here in an image taken on April 6, 2007, at 15:12 UTC. This is a composite of 3 exposures each 30 seconds long through I (infrared), R (red), and V (visible) photometric filters. The image was rendered in SAOImage ds9 with red, green and blue corresponding to those three filter bands. For the 650x480 pixels in this cropped image, the field of view shown is 5.8x4.3 arc minutes with north up and west to the right. Proxima is the 11.05 V magnitude spectral type M5.5V red star at the center.
Messier 4 is a nearby globular star cluster in Scorpius. This V-band image was taken during a full moon on April 2, 2007, at 15:49 UT from Mount Kent with the CDK20, and a STL6303 CCD camera. The 30 second exposure of a field of 0.31x0.46 degrees shows thousands of faint stars. A full resolution 2048x3072 version is available here.
Three 10 second exposures of M4 in I, V, and B were combined to make the color version seen here. The faintest stars shown are about 18th magnitude. The blue stars are in the asymptotic giant branch. The stars that appear red are cooler and are at the tip of the red giant branch. This image has been cropped from the original (see the previous image) and covers the center of the cluster in a field 877x1057 pixels or 7.9x9.5 minutes of arc.
Three 300 second exposures of M27, the Dumbell Nebula, in R, G, and B color imaging filters were taken on August 8, 2006 at 03:12 UTC with the Moore Observatory CDK20 and an STL6303 CCD camera. The telescope was autoguided using SBIG software for these exposures. Each image was processed with Cinepaint to match its dynamic range to an 8-bit display, and the three images were combined in Gimp. Color was balanced so that stars appear to have colors corresponding to their spectra type. Notice that that white dwarf at the center of this planetary nebula is distinctly blue. While dark images were taken and subtracted to reduce noise, the images have not been flattened to compensate for the non-uniform response of the CCD. The bright sky in Louisville contributes somewhat to the background in this image. The original image was cropped and reduced in scale by 2x. This image covers 10.2x9.1 minutes of arc.
