Outstanding Tom! If that's anything like what we're gonna see at your
May 13 presentation, I am really looking forward to seeing more. And
learning some of your techniques. Seeya then.
Dan Heim
On 4/30/2016 8:35 PM, Tom Polakis wrote:
http://www.pbase.com/polakis/image/163069532/original
The fan-shaped cloud that extends northward from the bright, illuminating
star (R Monocerotis) in this frame is called Hubble's Variable Nebula. As
dust swirls in the immediate vicinity of the star, it casts shadows on the
walls of the large shell, resulting in an ever-changing appearance.
This time-lapse GIF uses images that I have taken about weekly for the past
six months.
It will be too close to the sun to observe for the next three months, but
will return in the pre-dawn sky in August.
Images were taken with a 12 1/2" f/6.7 Dall-Kirkham telescope from my
backyard in Tempe. They are typically averaged 5-minute exposures with an
SBIG STXL-6300 camera that produces an image scale of 0.88 arcseconds per
pixel. I doubled the image scale in post-processing so viewers don't have to
lean into the display so much.
Yet again, I'd like to thank Mike Collins for doing 80 percent of the work
building my backyard observatory, without whom all of this would not have
been necessary.
Tom
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