By Rachel Dutton – Outreach Officer
The 12th October was International Astronomy Night and we partnered with Surrey Hills AONB to bring our telescopes to the masses. Despite the afternoon of Autumn showers, the skies opened to give us a beautiful view of the Moon and Saturn. Our visitors were of all ages and all of them keen to seen through our telescopes. We were answering questions about constellations, stars, aurora and the comet which remained elusive and went just below the horizon as it got dark.
We also had smart scopes stacking images, which is the process of taking many long exposures of very faint objects and layering them up so the signal increases and you eventually get a clear picture.
We had the Dumbell Nebula, a dying smaller mass star called a white dwarf shedding its outer layers
The Eagle Nebula which, if you Zoom in, you will see the Pillars of Creation.
We also have the Andromeda galaxy, another spiral galaxy within our local group. The Andromeda galaxy, if fully visible to the naked eye, would be similar in size to 6 full moons in a row in the sky. It needs a lot of time to get the images you are used to seeing, but as you can see, these images have a clear galactic centre.
We’ve attached the outputs that the scope supplies with some cropping to allow for field rotation, which is the name we give the artefacts left when you stack lots of images with an Alt Az mount which is what these scopes use. In reality, we would do a lot of processing and editing before adding these to a website, but this is what you would have seen during the outreach event.
If you would like to join us for future outreach events, make sure you are on our mailing list (opens a new window)
https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/623078/101028688342025510/share
Comments are closed