Who Takes Pictures of a Gas Cloud?

Well, I do.

This is the oft-photographed Lagoon Nebula - in the constellation Sagittarius.

I took this before I made the switch to digital - it's a single one-hour and 15 minute exposure on Velvia 50 film.

To get these long exposures to work, the telescope must be perfectly polar aligned. This allows only one set of motors to be required to keep the telescope perfectly tracking the object for the entire exposure, because the telescope must move only on one axis.

Otherwise, your stars are streaks instead of nice round points.

Yeah, I know. What a geek.  :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for writing this.