Extreme astrophotography

Folks, I thought shooting a sequence of a couple thousand frames through a 14" reflector was real cutting edge - 'til I saw this... :shock:

Note the asteroid with its companion moonlet...

Dave



While the Kalliope star occultation should have been visible only from somewhere in Asia, I could not resist to image Kalliope&Linus passing this star with the 2.2m telescope and the Lucky Imaging & High Speed Photometry instrument AstraLux at Calar Alto. You can have a look at the quite nice result under: www.barycenter.de/Kalliope_AstraLux.jpg

The broken appearance of the star's trail is due to the image selection algorithm that chooses only the frames with the best seeing, in this case 1625 frames of 65000 total, with 29.5ms exposure time each. Apparently the seeing was better at the beginning of the observation.

Best regards:
Felix Hormuth

WOW :shock: 29.5ms each. A decent QE for that chip then:)

Holy smokes! You could drive a bus through those two. The Dawes limit for a 2.2m (86.6") scope is 0.05arcsecs, which that image is definitely approaching. The small satellite asteroid is less than .081arcsecs in diameter!

Your 14" should be able to resolve 0.33arcsec with a steady sky, Dave... looks like you need a little more practice and perserverence!

Phil.

PS - Dawes (empirical) Limit (the theoretical resolving power of a scope) is: 4.56arcsecs / Diameter of Objective (in inches)

Dawes (theoretical) Limit is: 5.45arcsecs / Diameter of Objective (in inches)

An amazing technical feat, that kind of resolution is breathtaking.

WOW :shock: 29.5ms each. A decent QE for that chip then:)

It was the 65000 images that took my breath away! And after all that, only 1625 were used - 2.5%

I guess we'll just have to dream on....

It was the 65000 images that took my breath away! And after all that, only 1625 were used - 2.5%

I guess we'll just have to dream on....

Oh pish! 65,000 x 29.5ms is only 1915.5 seconds or 31.9 minutes. Not long enough for your tea to go cold... It's pressing the shutter release cable that fast and so often that blows me away!

Phil.