PHOT: Portable High-speed Occultation Telescopes

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First Light, November 21, 2004

On November 21, 2004, observers Eliot Young and Leslie Young (SwRI/Boulder) took this image of the Trapezium Cluster in the Orion Nebula with the Portable High-speed Occultation Telescope (PHOT) systems, from Boulder Colorado, under partly cloudy skies. The PHOT systems are designed for observing occultations by small solar system objects. This "first-light" image was taken during the first night a PHOT camera was mounted to its telescope for astronomical imaging. The PHOT camera is a Princeton Instrument MicroMAX:512BFT from Roper Scientific, a frame-transfer CCD with essentially no deadtime. The PHOT telescope is a Meade 14" telescope with GPS "goto" controller. The mount for the camera is a custom mount made by Johnsonian Designs (Loveland CO). The image shown here is a stack of ten 2-second exposures with no filter. The individual frames have been shifted before adding, and no other processing (such as division by a flat field) has been done. The image is displayed with a logarithmic stretch to show both the bright stars in Trapezium and the nebulosity. The pixel scale is 0.723 arcsec/pixel for a field-of-view of 6.2 arcmin.
Last updated 2004 Nov 27 by Leslie Young, layoung@boulder.swri.edu , http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~layoung