DMK Images with Star Analyser

Blogged by Xiao Sun on February 10, 2010 and tagged with Sample Images, Saturn, Sun.

Recently we received a few astronomy pictures from Piotr Maliński, who image the night sky with his DMK 21AF04.AS astronomy camera. What makes his pictures different this time is he used another optics, Star Analyser, to reveal the spectrum characteristics of the celestial bodies, including nebula, star, and planet.

For instance, this is the view of Orion Trapezium after the filter:

Orion Trapezium

And this is how Betelgeuse looks like on spectrum:

Betelgeuse Spectrum

Saturn

Saturn Spectrum

And here is the setup of his optics

Photography System

Let me quote his e-mail to give you more details:

My Star Analyser arrived and I was able to get some spectrum images with DMK21 and that diffraction grating. You mount the filter to the camera nose (with Star Analyser spacer) and point the scope on a star. In marked on the filter direction spectrums will be generated by the grating - for stars it will be long colorful beams of light. For emission nebulaes (small in size with sharp borders) the spectrum will appear as cloned images of the nebula [...] long star spectrums and nebula cloned shape in O-III and H-Alfa bands.

Procesing the spectrums of stars and similar objects will reveal a lot of detailslike chemical composition. For example Betelgeuse spectrum from my setup doesn't differ from more proffesional sources. [...] Saturn is big ball of gas, mostly of hydrogen, and relected sunlight will have hydrogen absorption bands (and broad H-Alfa filters may give very good
images of the planet).[...]

Thank you Piotr! I am sure your photographs will interest many people in this community.

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