No Way Its A Mirror

So my last post was about an all nighter on Tuesday, well I did it again on Wednesday. Worth my time though as I now have 10 Messier objects photographed. By photographed I mean over 50 photos of each, and each with one to two minutes of exposure time since Nebulas are dim. The pictures are taken with the 32" Austin-Fellows which I only recently got trained on how to use since it is such a touchy telescope. Less of a precision instrument and more of a well trained dog. I've been using this observatory for three years now and they made sure I had their phone numbers before letting Tony and I (different Tony) solo the Austin-Fellows the past two nights.

Well then you take those 50 photos, 10 in each color being filtered, red, green, blue, clear and H Alpha. Then you put 'em together with 30 photos that are taken to correct the images. Thats 10 bias frames (pictures taken with 0 second exposure times, used to subtract white noise), 10 dark frames (long exposure with the lens cap on, used to subtract dark noise I guess) and 10 flat frames (images taken of the twilight sky in each color filter that reveal dust grains on the filter). All in all the following image is worth 80 photos or 80,000 words.

By my calculations, this is a god damned novel.

That is the Eagle Nebula, complete with the pillars of creation as made famous by Hubble. I will post the other nine as I finish them and more. I don't know if our professor knows what he was getting himself into when he gave us permission to pursue a pretty pictures project over science. Actually the technique used above has never been done here and I'm actually writing a step by step guide on it. Usually you would do RGB, LRGB or Halpha RGB, but I used all 5 options above and it worked marvelously.

Then tonight we had an open house where probably 50 people came up to look at the incredibly impressive clouds everywhere (<\sarcasm> what were these people thinking). During this time I heard one of the most terrifying sentences I have ever heard at an observatory. I heard a young boy shout "Woah! Look its a mirror!" to which his friend replied "Let me touch it!". 

Heres why that sentence is terrifying. We were in the dome of the Metzger, a 20 inch reflector telescope. I was 10 feet away. And the mirror in question the boy wanted to touch is worth 30,000 god damned dollars. I nearly shat myself. I ran over and against my WalMart don't get us sued job training I grabbed his arm and told him not to touch it. He had already touched it. Nothing broken but I just cleaned the damn thing. Cleaning it is a laborious operation with latex gloves and several bags of cottonballs. Oh well, gonna go get some cotton balls.