Thanks for the synopsis, Kurt. Wish I could have been there. Kim -----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Canopus56 Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 1:29 PM To: Utah Astronomy List Serv Subject: [Utah-astronomy] Notes from BYU WMO presentation Tuesday night For the benefit of those that missed last night's presentation at the November Salt Lake Astron. Soc. meeting, Dr. Bruce Joyner of BYU's Western Mountain Observatory gave an extended presentation on BYU's 1-meter NSF-funded small telescope installation. The BYU program is a little further along in development as compared to the UofU's telescope. The essence of their science program is pairing their 1 meter urban setting scope on West Mountain with a Fingerlakes-Fairchild chip CCD that has excellent noise control. This enables students to take science quality measurements based on an online request form through which BYU fields proposals from around the country. Their program seems to focus on time-series studies, e.g. - variable light curves. How the BYU scope was used to prepare a light-curve of an extra-galactic Cepheid variable in M31 was illustrated. With respect to publicity photos, which can be seen at http://wmo.byu.edu/gallery/ , the BYU program takes the images, but has paired with Rob Gendler, a world famous amateur image processor, to process the high quality narrow-band filter results seen in BYU's image gallery. Joyner noted that effective the narrow band imaging (in Ha, OII and S) can be done from light polluted locations, again as illustrated in the BYU image gallery. For example, the BYU M16 and NGC281 nebula images - taken from an urban setting - does not have the fine detail of the corresponding famous Hubble images, but the BYU images do give the Hubble 1990s images a good "run for its money." See - http://wmo.byu.edu/images/M16-BYULL.jpg http://wmo.byu.edu/images/NGC281-BYULL.jpg Joyner recommended Gendler's website that contains a paper that overviews his aesthetic imaging techniques. Gendler Website http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/ (see "Articles" section at left frame below the screen fold for Gendler's tutorial papers.) December's Sky and Telescope also has a good article on narrow band imaging from urban locations (pp. 72-77). Joyner also provided an example of how one of Gendler's high-quality images was pair with a space telescope narrow field image in a published paper regarding extra-galactic gas in M51. The Hubble only has a few arc minute field of view, but Gendler's wide-field amateur image that covered all of M51 with amazing detail tied the gas patterns seen in a small Hubble view to wider gas structures in Gendler's image. Because the Hubble has such a narrow TFOV, it is not practical for professionals to obtain enough imaging time on the Hubble in order to make a mosaic covering the wide-TFOV views seen in Gendler's amateur image. - Clear Skies - Kurt _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com ----- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1153 / Virus Database: 424/3233 - Release Date: 11/02/10 Internal Virus Database is out of date.