In late July, 2001 I attended the National Conference of the Astronomical League held in Frederick, MD. During that conference Dr. Frank Drake, pioneering SETI researcher, came to gauge the interesting the amateur Astronomical community might have in participating in his Optical SETI program.
I found Dr. Drake to be a wonderfully personable. We spent a bit of dinner discussing how he got started in his work and found that Dr. Drake had hung out at the same observatory - Fuertes - on the north campus of Cornell University, that I do.
Very nice guy.
This is my first CCD image. It is of SS Cygni. It was taken with the Bradford Robotic Telescope in the Canary Islands.
This was a first experiment. The integration is 90 seconds and this accounts for the over-exposure of some of the stars in the field, including SS Cyg itself. As such, I didn't believe that this image was good enough for photometric analysis.
But it was my first...
M81. Taken
with the GRAS-05 robotic telescope in NM. 60s integration. Johnson-V filter. January 10, 2008.
This is my
first science image taken with the GRAS-02 robotic telescope in NM.
SS Cyg.
Estimated at 8.788 +/- 0.004 magnitude.
26 Nov 2007, 03:31:56UTC.
This CCD image shows (1) Ceres, the brightest object in the field. What it also shows, after astrometric analysis, is another object signified by the arrow in the middle of the field.
Details of this Object:
T=2007-12-16 05:18:33UTC
RA 02h 38' 47.45"
Dec 08d 32' 15.6"
V=~14
S/N=~14
This correspond to no known object in the MPC database. Unfortunately
experienced asteroid photometrists and astrometrists have examined this
image, and another taken 20 hours later which appear to show movement
of the object, and deemed them faults in the image - something that is not
entirely uncommon even after flats and darks have been applied.
So close and yet so far!