First Light" from the new teaching telescope

20 Jan 2013
20 Jan 2013

First light image of 30 Doradus taken on January 20, 2013 with the UCT teaching telescope. This is a raw image (22 x 30 seconds exposures with the L filter, automatic off-axis guiding and adaptive optics) with no calibration (flat field, bias, dark frames) taken in very strong wind conditions. Despite the wind, the image quality is quite good over the whole field of view. The image is binned 4 x 4, so ~3.0 arcsec/pixel for a field ~37' x 25'. The CCD detector is Peltier and water cooled at ~ -20C. The filters available are the broadband LRGB set and UBVRI set, plus Halpha and OIII interference filters. The C14 (35.5 cm) optical tube is combined with a focal reducer, which changes the focal ratio from F/12.6 to F/7.3, which still yields a pixel of 0.725 arcsec with no binning. The telescope is installed on a Paramount MX mount and is equipped with an instrument rotator and an automatic focuser. Still to be commissioned is the self-guided spectrograph, which will yield resolution from 9 to 1 Angstroms/pixel.