Digital Observing from the Canary Islands...

Hi Folks:

I thought I'd share this image that I took with the Bradford Robotic Telescope in Tenerife Observatory, Tenerife Island, which is part of the Canary Islands.

The Bradford Robotic Telescope is a UK scope dedicated to education, largely. The Observatory sports three telescopes, two of which are just DSLR cameras. This image was taken on 7 August at 11:38PM EDT with the "Constellation" scope, a Nikon 16mm f2.8 lens that gives a field of view of ~40 sq. degrees. The exposure was for 2 seconds with no filter.

Some fast and dirty photometry was done on the image using DS9 coming up with a magnitude of 2.9±0.1. My next attempt will have smaller error bars, I promise, but this estimate did come within the range we are seeing for our star.

In this image Capella is the bright star just to the left of the middle near the dome opening. Eps Aur is above and to the right forming the apex of a triangle lying on its side, its base formed by our two comparison stars to the right.

Other interesting objects in this image include, in the upper right hand corner, M45. Also, at the very top center we have Beta Per, or Algol, another famous eclipsing binary.
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Richard 'Doc' Kinne, [KQR]
Somerville, MA