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Hi all...
Was pondering my future retirement dreams and visions of a large telescope and observatory in some reasonably dark location in the southeast... By large I mean something in the 24 to 40 inch class.... Now it is apparent from some of the CCD pics amatuers have taken of the planets with more modest size scopes that they are able to reach darn close to the theoretical limits of resolution and contrast...ie in the .5 to .25 arc second range.... Butttt....these result from several things.....first modest size scopes ( 8 to 16 inches).....secondly...they can image for hours, days, even weeks to get a good planetary shot.....and thirdly....they take many FAST images where they "freeze" the seeing, pick the best looking of some fraction of them, and then combine that fraction for a final image.... Back to the large dream scope....lets say Im not really interested doing the planet imaging thing....Im more interested in CCD photometry, asteroid searches/astrometry, nova patrol, faint comets etc etc......now this kind of work (if your looking to be at all efficient about it) requires long exposures per frame...and the ability to use the majority of the frames taken....so now in addition to having a scope 2 to 5 times as large as what the planetary imagers use we also have the exact opposite in terms of exposure duration and required fraction of usable frames.... Sorry, getting to my point here....now I find it hard to imagine if I built a 40 inch scope and it was located somewhere near sea level in the southeast USA, that I would get anything remotely close to .1 arc second star images on CCD frames ranging anywhere from 30 seconds to many minute exposures (and lets assume seeing is our only problem....other problems such as tracking, scope vibrations, tube currents, overly warm observatory etc etc have been eliminated).... Now, my WAG is that such large scopes probably dont exceed .5 arc seconds imaging give or take the majority of the time...if that good... Anybody here with relatable experience or other WAGS? take care Blll |
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