RhoOphiuchus LRGB

Comment

Comment by Derek Baker on June 27, 2011 at 10:27am

Thanks Trevor! :-)

It's a big chip, an Apogee U16M which is 4096x4096pixels at 9u per pixel --> 36mmx36mm sensor, or about 150% of the area of the STL11000. It was a lot of money, but it's noise & sensitivity characteristics are much better than the 11000M chip too)

Also contributing to the wide field is the scope I used. It is a wide-field astrograph, the Takahashi FSQ106N, which is designed for illuminating large film/ccd chips with no significant curvature of the field or other nasty abberations.

The combination undersamples the field a bit (3.5arc sec per pixel) but is great for gobbling up large pieces of real estate, which is what I'm aiming for when I get out to dark skies. And it collects a lot of photons relatively quickly, which is great, because the full-well depth of the Kodak 16803 chip is very good. Consequently, a better S/N ratio in each exposure is possible.

BTW, I have also been shooting with the purpose of doing really large area mosaics, but I'm moving slowly to get this done, because I am still learning how to process mosaics. I seem to be able to do 2-frame ones just fine (most of the time), but anything larger isn't turning out to be satisfactory just yet...

cheers,

Derek

Comment by Trevor Woodrow on June 24, 2011 at 7:13pm

Wow! Leave it alone brother...this is beautiful! Well done. Huge FOV....mosaic or huge chip?

Comment by Derek Baker on June 24, 2011 at 6:07pm

Thanks Arie & Samiam! :-)

Comment by Derek Baker on June 20, 2011 at 2:22pm

Thanks Steve! :-)

Comment by Steve Coates on June 18, 2011 at 8:07am

Very nice. Excellent work with this target.