Tag Archives: Astronomy

West Point visits the Kuhn

June 10, 2016 by admin | Comments Off

On December 26, 2015 The Orange County Astronomers had some visitors from the West Point Military Academy. They stopped by to see the club’s 22inch telescope, known as the Kuhn Telescope. They were being hosted by Pat Knoll, Ralph Emerson, and Trey Mcgriff, who helped install a telescope setup at West Point. Here is a portrait of the group  beside the Kuhn Telescope. Dr. Paula Fekete is shown at the telescope eyepiece.

Some visitors from West Point Military Academy at the OCA Kuhn TelescopeAfter posing for this shot we took a VR panorama, click on the image below to view a larger version, you can also expand it to the full size of your screen. Click and drag in the scene to scroll around.  Even though it was a cold and very windy evening, we had a good time.

[pano file=”wp-visit/wp-visit.htm” preview=”wp-visit/WP_p1.jpg” ]

 



 


 


 


 

					

               
  	
	


	

	
		
NGC 2264 – Cone Nebula and region


  			

      December 27, 2014
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Here is an image that has taken me awhile to get around to finally processing. It is of NGC 2264 and the Cone Nebula region. Also known as the Christmas Tree cluster it is located in the constellation Monoceros, about 2,700 light years from Earth. This image was taken over 3 nights with a total exposure time of 9.5 hours through color filters. Of which 4.5 hours was for Luminance, and 100 minutes each for Red, Green, and Blue, exposure was 10 minutes long. The camera was a cooled CCD camera made by QSI, the QSI 583ws model. The telescope used was a Borg 125SD, 5 inch refractor at f6.4, for a focal length of about 800mm. The images were then calibrated and stacked together to make the final color image.


Enjoy.


NGC 2264 - Cone Nebula and region


 

					

               
  	
	


	

	
		
Venus Transit


  			

      June 5, 2012
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Here are some images from the Venus transit, which occurred on June 5, 2012. These were taken from Santa Ana, CA on the top level of a parking structure. I used my Canon 1D M4 with a 100-400mm at 400mm and a 1.4x which gave me a focal length of  560mm, these are crops of the image, taken using a solar filter. You can see several sunspots in addition to Venus as it moved across the face of the sun. These were taken over a period of about 3 hours. Hope you enjoy them, click on the images to see larger versions.


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