ASTRO: M-26, Open Star Cluster in Scutum

There's still a good handful of Messier Objects that we don't have images of
on the Kopernik Observatory website. They are mostly the ones that don't fit
well on a CCD chip with the 20-inch RC Cass because they cover too large a
patch of sky. Also, there's a number of them taken with the old ST-6 CCD
thru our Brandon 80mm APO refractor (finder on the 20) that need updates
with a more modern camera.

However M-26 does fit on the STL chip with the 20-inch focal reduced to
around F/5. The field of view is about 20x25 arc minutes with a image scale
of 1.2 arc-secs/pixel. This was a very short RGB image that I took back in
early September.

M-26 is one of those objects forgotten because of its more famous
neighbors - in this case the magnificent M-11. When searching around the web
for other images I did find that M-26 was used as a recent target to test
the new adaptive optics system on the Hale 200-inch. Cal Tech lists the
distance as 5,200 light years on their web page showing this image.

For more info on M-26, see: http://www.kopernik.org/images/archive/m26.htm

Clear skies,

George Normandin

Nice one George. Another object I have not imaged yet.

Stefan

"George Normandin" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...
There's still a good handful of Messier Objects that we don't have images
of on the Kopernik Observatory website. They are mostly the ones that
don't fit well on a CCD chip with the 20-inch RC Cass because they cover
too large a patch of sky. Also, there's a number of them taken with the
old ST-6 CCD thru our Brandon 80mm APO refractor (finder on the 20) that
need updates with a more modern camera.

However M-26 does fit on the STL chip with the 20-inch focal reduced to
around F/5. The field of view is about 20x25 arc minutes with a image
scale of 1.2 arc-secs/pixel. This was a very short RGB image that I took
back in early September.

M-26 is one of those objects forgotten because of its more famous
neighbors - in this case the magnificent M-11. When searching around the
web for other images I did find that M-26 was used as a recent target to
test the new adaptive optics system on the Hale 200-inch. Cal Tech lists
the distance as 5,200 light years on their web page showing this image.

For more info on M-26, see: http://www.kopernik.org/images/archive/m26.htm

Clear skies,

George Normandin

"Stefan Lilge" wrote
....
Nice one George. Another object I have not imaged yet.

Thanks Stefan! You'll have to wait for next year for this one!

George N