The 3towers Observatory: Comets

Comet Hale Bopp. 17mm f/4.5 lens, 30 second exposure on Fujicolor 100 film.  Notice the setting Moon, the Pleiades, Algol just above Hale Bopp, and Auriga.

Other views of Comet Hale Bopp. Notice the 3towers observatory in the lower left hand corner.

3towers Observatory comet and asteroid images were originally taken on a 12-inch LX 200 telescope using a focal reducer at f/6.5 with an Apogee KX260 CCD camera or an Apogee AP7 CCD camera running under MaxIm DL/CCD. The black and white images vary from single 30 second exposures to images produced by adding two or more one-minute exposures together using a median routine in Mira or MaxIM DL/CCD.

The older color images were taken with the Apogee AP7 CCD and an ISIS FW1 Filter Wheel containing Red (R), Green (V), Blue (B), Infrared (I), and Clear Photometeric filters. They are composites of multiple individual 30-60 sec red (R), green (V), blue (B), and clear (CL) exposures added together to make final tri-color CCD images. In general, the only image processing used was bias and dark subtraction, flat fielding, and contrast stretching.

More recent images (since March 2012) were obtained with a C-11 HyperStar combination with either a Starlight Xpress SXVR-H9C single shot color camera, a Canon 60Da camera, or a Canon 7D Mark II camera.

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