So I'm out at Kitt Peak (in Arizona) right now with Paul, working to get the new imaging CCD up and running on Case's Burrell Schmidt telescope. It finally saw the sky tonight, and so I thought I'd post a "First Light" image. So here is an image of the Virgo cluster of galaxies, raw off the telescope from a couple of hours ago. It's rough -- no image processing has been done to flatten the image, remove artifacts, etc. But here's it is, an expanse of Virgo 1.5 degrees on a side:
That's the giant elliptical galaxy M87 down at the lower left, and the elliptical M86 to the upper right. "Markarian's Chain" of galaxies is strung across the top.
With apologies to the folks at WIYN, I think we just might need to dub this CCD system the "Two Degree Imager".
OK, I'm pooped, and going to bed....
That's the giant elliptical galaxy M87 down at the lower left, and the elliptical M86 to the upper right. "Markarian's Chain" of galaxies is strung across the top.
3 comments:
Pretty cool...but Thalia's drawings make more sense to me.
Nice. Are those cosmic ray hits or or over-exposed stars? And is that really the jet of M87 there?
Would that work with an objective prism? Hmmm.
Very cool. Good luck with the rest of your run!
Yes, all the tiny dots are saturated stars. And no, M87's jet is on much smaller scales than you can see here -- what you are seeing is a small galaxy very near M87.
The days of objective prisms on the Burrell Schmidt are over, I'm afraid...
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