This page illustrates some of the results obtained by OU students attending the one-day event at the University of London Observatory on 2003 March 22nd, organized by by FUSION, the Open University Physics Society (principal contact: Jim Grozier).

The original page (including links to scripts) providing information for OU students attending the one-day event is available here.

Images obtained by OU students

Images are available as JPEG (compressed) images, for quick download. Uncompressed TIF images are also available, but are much bigger and may not show a great deal more detail. A broadband connection will be required to download the Radcliffe TIFs conveniently.

The Radcliffe 24-inch refractor

The Radcliffe 24-inch refractor was used with a Wright Instruments 1200 x 800 pixel CCD camera. A red filter was used throughout. The images have been processed to remove flat-field variations and cosmic rays. All images are false colour, with North at the top and East to the left. Full-size images cover an area of about 12 by 8 arcminutes on the sky.

The objects observed were the galaxies Messier 51 and Messier 81, the open cluster Messier 67, and Comet C/2001 RX14 (LINEAR).

	Object	Exposure	JPEG image	TIF image
	Messier 51	240 s	121 kb	1.8 Mb
	Messier 81	180 s	124 kb	3.4 Mb
	Messier 67	60 s	86 kb	2.8 Mb
	Comet C/2001 RX14 (LINEAR)	120 s	157 kb	1.5 Mb

The Meade 10-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain

The Meade 10-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain was used with an SBIG ST8 CCD camera (1530 x 1020 pixels, but mainly used here with 3x3 binning). The images have been processed to remove dark current and flat-field variations. Some of the stellar images are slightly distorted due to tracking errors in the telescope drive. All images are greyscale or false colour, with North at the top and East to the left.

The objects observed were the galaxies Messier 82 and NGC 4258, the open cluster Messier 67, and the Eskimo Nebula (NGC 2392, planetary nebula).

	Object	Exposure	JPEG image	TIF image
	Messier 82	300 s	10 kb	349 kb
	NGC 4258	1200 s	14 kb	459 kb
	Messier 67	60 s	24 kb
	NGC 2392 (Eskimo Nebula)	600 s	9 kb	532 kb

Steve Fossey
2004 August 3