The 90Prime comet - another view

Here's another angle on the "90Prime Comet" as its dewar is filled with Liquid Nitrogen. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 1 second at f/6.3, ISO 100.

Topping the 90Prime dewar

We spent the evening last night training to use the 90Prime camera on the Steward Observatory 90 inch telescope for a night of observing this Thursday. One of the things that needs to be done is to top the CCD camera dewar with Liquid Nitrogen to keep the detector cold and reduce noise when observing faint objects. This image shows the 90 inch telescope with the prime focus camera dewar at right with what looks like a comet coming from the end of the dewar. That is just the nitrogen gas venting as the liquid is forced into the dewar. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 20 seconds at f/22, ISO 100. The long exposure not only allowed the motion of the venting to be smeared but also helps keep the entire image in focus with the small f-stop. It also gives a really cool star pattern to the lights in the background due to diffraction affects in the optics.

Halos and domes

The two Spacewatch telescope domes are shown against a sky with the Moon and its halo. The 1.8-m telescope dome is on the left and the 36 inch Mosaic camera dome is just right of the Moon. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 400.

Halo around the dome

Another shot from Sunday night, this one shows the lunar halo apparently around the dome of our 1.8-m Spacewatch telescope. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 400.

Of halos and telescopes

Cirrus is keeping me from observing, but not from getting pretty pictures of the sky and telescopes on Kitt Peak. The Moon is producing a nice halo (unless you're trying to observe faint asteroids and comets in which case it is a bad halo). At lower right is the Spacewatch 36 inch telescope dome. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 400.