Home Observatory: Background

After 11 years of visual astronomy, traveling to darker skies and hoping for good weather were yielding too few actual nights under the stars. It was time to build a home observatory: The Robservatory was born.

By far, the biggest challenge for amateur and professional astronomers worldwide is the rapid and relentless disappearance of dark skies as a result of light pollution. To counter this effect, the imaging of certain objects which transmit light at special frequencies (typically emission nebula, planetery nebula, and some galaxies) can be done through narrowband filters, which transmit light only at these very specific, narrow wavelengths, while blocking broaderband light from sources such as streetlights, house lights, and even the moon.

All images on this site have been captured at The Robservatory, located 12 miles west of Manhattan, under some of the worst light pollution on the planet.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Inside The Robservatory



Imaging is done with an ATK 314L+ cooled CCD camera (upgraded from 16HR shown) on a TMB92 f5.5 triplet-apo refractor with a Televue .8x focal reducer/flattener.

The guidescope is a Televue Pronto, with guiding via a StellaCam3 video camera.

A dual screen laptop is used for image capture and guiding.

The mount is a Losmandy G11 (upgraded from GM8 in photo).




Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)