HOYS data from New Mexico – A HOYS participant perspective
I was impressed with the images from the Edinburgh group that were posted in last week’s newsletter. Because of the monsoons here in the desert southwest (I’m in Tucson, my scope is in New Mexico), we don’t get a lot of imaging time during the summer. So, I devote the few hours of clear skies to gathering data for HOYS. I decided to combine the RGB data just to see what I could get from single 5 minute integrations. Here are a couple of the results:
You can see the full resolution images here:
The images were made with a small astrograph (10 inches, f/3.75), with a full frame CCD camera (STL11000) and off-the-shelf RGB filters. Five minute integrations through each filter gets submitted to HOYS. I was pleasantly surprised that these short exposures, when combined, could produce decent images of the HOYS target FOVs. While I usually shoot much longer exposures (6-8 hours) for deep sky objects, it seemed a shame not to use the HOYS data. Not too much post processing went into these images; just a bit of noise reduction and saturation boost. These images were made with a 16 year old CCD camera; I imagine that the newer CMOS devices could capture a significant amount of data for the HOYS project, and produce some great images as well.
Gregg Ruppel
Tucson