A new camera for the Moses Holden Telescope at Alston Observatory saw first light on the evening of September 7th 2016 and took this stunning image of the Ring Nebula.
The image is made up of a 120-second B-band exposure, a 30-second V-band exposure, and a 30-second R-band exposure. The pixel scale was 0.41 arc seconds, and the seeing was around 3 arc seconds. The images have been resampled on a 2×2 grid, making the final pixel scale roughly 0.82 arc seconds.
The new camera represents a £20k investment by the University, and is an Andor Aspen CG16M, with 4096 x 4096 pixels of 9 microns each. The chip is the latest Kodak KAF-16803.
The second image taken by the new camera was of galaxy NGC7331. This image is made up of three 120-second exposures in B-, V-, & R-bands. The nearly edge-on nature of this spiral galaxy is clearly visible.
Featured Image: The Ring Nebula with the zoom in to scale.
An image of the galaxy NGC7331 taken with the new camera