Pluto has very much been on everyone’s mind this week with all the information from NASA’s New Horizons mission that has been released this week. Long time RAC member Mark Lang took advantage of the skies during the July RAC observing session to build his own very cool animation of Pluto taken from here in North Carolina. Please note, you need to click the image to see the animation.
Image by Mark Lang
This imagewas taken with an 8″ f/6.2 home-made Newtonian reflector and an SBIG ST-402 CCD camera. Pluto at magnitude 14.1 is currently located in a very crowded star field in Sagittarius. After spending about 20 minutes finding and verifying the field which contained Pluto with the camera, Mark started taking five sets of images separated by about half an hour. Exposures were tracked, but unguided. The first group started around 11:30pm and the last finished up around 1:30am. You can notice the seeing get worse as the animation gets to frames 3-5.
Individual exposures were 15 seconds long and then dark subtracted. The individual exposures were median combined with the best 7-10 frames in it’s group and saved. The photos were then taken into Photoshop and the animation was created. Some star reduction and sharpening was used on the final three frames to compensate for the bad seeing.
