max magnitude to capture with a CCD?

Ok, assume you want to get into the field of capturing after glows of gamma ray bursts, or
supernova hunting.
what would be the typical magnitude you can capture with a CCD using a 8" or 10" or 12" (or
more?) telescope? Any data available?
what kind of a setup would be required to be a player in these fields?
--
md

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 01:15:40 +0200, "md" not given to avoid spam wrote:

Ok, assume you want to get into the field of capturing after glows of gamma ray bursts, or
supernova hunting.
what would be the typical magnitude you can capture with a CCD using a 8" or 10" or 12" (or
more?) telescope? Any data available?
what kind of a setup would be required to be a player in these fields?

A reference point: I easily see mag 18 stars in 5-minute exposures with a ST8i
on a 12" LX200. I see mag 21 stars in 120-minute exposures with the same camera.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

Any data available?
what kind of a setup would be required to be a player in these fields?
--
md
Going from memory here, may be a few errors,...

A few years ago there was a contest to see who as an amateur could image the
faintest star. A well characterized starfield was chosen as the target and the
results, or at least an article on the winner was published in either Astronomy
or S&T.

Anyway, the guy who won had captured a magnitude 24.2 star, fainter than the
Palomar scope was orignally capable of, according to the article. He was from
Canada, used a Newtonian that was large but not huge, built the entire thing
himself, stacked a long series of 2 minute exposures and had written 70,000
lines of code to control the scope and do the image processing.

Thats the way I remember the story..

jon

On 23 Aug 2004 10:12:32 GMT, (Jon Isaacs) wrote:

A few years ago there was a contest to see who as an amateur could image the
faintest star. A well characterized starfield was chosen as the target and the
results, or at least an article on the winner was published in either Astronomy
or S&T.

Anyway, the guy who won had captured a magnitude 24.2 star, fainter than the
Palomar scope was orignally capable of, according to the article. He was from
Canada, used a Newtonian that was large but not huge, built the entire thing
himself, stacked a long series of 2 minute exposures and had written 70,000
lines of code to control the scope and do the image processing.

Thats the way I remember the story..

That's about how I remember it, too. Naturally, the limiting magnitude of a CCD
is determined by the exposure time (and the sky background). But if your goal is
supernova searches (as suggested by the original poster) then 20-30 hour
exposures are probably not practical. It is going to take an awful long time to
cover the sky at that rate!

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com