4/2/2009:

I went stargazing in New Mexico this morning. Steve Cullen offered a get-acquainted promotion: spend an hour using a remote-controlled 20-inch Ritchey-Chretien his company, Lightbuckets, maintains in the Sacramento Mountains between Cloudcroft and Mayhill. I found his offer just before it expired and got my observing run set up just under the wire. The last week of March was cloudy and windy in the Sacramentos, so Steve moved the last few guest sessions to the company's observatory in the New Mexico bootheel, near Rodeo, in the afternoon shadow of Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains. The Rodeo instrument is 20% larger and feeds a far more efficient camera; retail on the telescope, mount, and camera is somewhere north of our mortgage (and the usual rent is $100/hour). While the sun came up in North Carolina and miles of clouds dropped inches of rain, "my" telescope mined 218 megabytes of deep sky data just ahead of the New Mexico dawn, here distillled using Maxim DL for this quick look:

 

Messier 3, 18 minutes luminance plus 6 minutes each in R, G, and B. Additional 10s, 30s, and 60s luminance frames retain core detail. 24-inch RCOS carbon-truss Ritchey-Chretien, Apogee Alta U42 CCD. Thanks to Lightbuckets for the hospitality!