It was a special event for the Tohono O'odham and they had the McMath Pierce telescope set up to watch sunset. It projects an image of the Sun almost a meter in diameter on a table.
You can see the projected image has the same orange color as the Sun would if you looked at it naked eye. The Sun is setting behind a distant mountain as you can see in the picture.For this event, a couple of the large telescopes were open for visual observing including Steward Observatory's 2.3 meter telescope and the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope. They things rarely have eyepieces on them, so it was a real treat to get to look through the big scopes. The 3.5 meter telescope is now officially the largest telescope I have looked through visually.
very cool and very beautiful!
ReplyDeletethanks for sharing it with us!!
Very nice pics,hale. Reminds of times that I went to he Modine Benstead Observatory out in Yorkville with my father.I remember seeing the rings of Saturn,polar ice caps on Mars,and the moons of Jupiter. And that is only a 16 inch Newtonian. I could only imagine what you see out of a 3.5 meter telescope.
ReplyDeleteHale, what are these telescopes usually hooked up to? Cameras, computers?
ReplyDeleteNext public night open house at the Modine-Benstead Observatory is this Friday, September 19 - 8:00 to 11:00 PM http://www.rasastro.org/events.htm
I went to one of those years ago. It was great.
Gorgeous pics hale. Cool how they project it to a table. I always have trouble seeing into the lens.
ReplyDeleteI went to Modine Observatory once. I can't remember what they had it pointing to. It just looked like a big circle of light to me. What I do recall is the incessant mosquitoes biting my ankles. I just wanted out of there.
I also went to the Gifford Planetarium one evening for a show they presented. We had stopped for a few refreshments beforehand. Instead of a "show," it became a class, with the speaker directing questions at unsuspecting audience members, putting them on the spot. I kept thinking, don't ask me....don't ask me....
It was a nice night...good for those pics!
ReplyDeleteYes, Orbs, all big telescopes have various instruments connected to them. The two big classes are digital cameras which are used to take the pretty pictures and spectrographs which break light into its component colors similar to a prism so we can really study what colors of light objects give off.
The cameras used are a little different than your Kodak Easyshare in your pocket. They have much higher quality CCD chips and are frequently cooled with liquid nitrogen to reduce electronic noise (electronic noise is not such a big deal when taking a picture of a brightly lit scene but can be killer when trying to image a faint object).
And do check out the Modine open house. They have very nice telescopes. Word to the Wise: If the line for the 16 inch telescope inside is long, check out some of the telescopes outside. They sometimes have a 20 inch Dobsonian telescope outside that usually has a shorter line!