Pretty Picture

Wow, I've been lax about updating the blog -- things have been kind of hectic lately. And I'm afraid it's gonna continue this way until late April, sorry.

In the meantime, let me at least show you this really cool picture of our telescope out at Kitt Peak, taken the other night by an ex-student of mine, Steven. Click on the image to see it full size, then come back and read how he did it.



To take this picture, he set up the camera on a remote scaffold,
pointed at the observatory dome. The camera was set to take a three
minute long timed exposure; during this time, he walked back inside
the observatory (you can see his flashlight trail bobbing along to the
lower right), and rotated the dome so that the dome slit -- the
opening in the dome that the telescope looks through -- rotates across
the telescope (and Steven himself!). So the dome slit acts like a slow
moving shutter exposing the telescope to the camera -- the net result
is a "cutaway" effect, giving the appearance of no dome in front of
the telescope at all.

Simultaneously, the Earth's rotation makes the stars slowly travel
across the sky as the camera exposes, so that instead of looking like
dots, the stars appear as streaks in the sky. The three stars of
Orion's belt are visible just above the dome; Betelguese shows at the
top center of the image; and the bright star Sirius appears to the far
left. At far right, the moon can be seen low in the sky.

My jaw kind of hit the floor when he sent this to me. It came out
incredibly well.

Just thought I'd share. Beautifully done, Steven...