This pair of images, by Jesse Zeldes ’22 were an assignment for Astro341: Advances Observational Astrophysics, which is running through the Fall 2020 semester.
These images show Mars and the Moon during their Sept 5th 2020 conjunction taken through 3 separate filters using the CCD on our 16″ telescope.
Jesse explains: “Because the Moon orbits Earth, while Mars orbits the Sun, even images taken in quick succession show the relative motion between them. Here we have the same set of images of the Moon and Mars in conjunction on September 5, 2020, processed in two different ways. ”
Jesse continues: “The images consist of five 0.07 second exposures in each of the g, r and i filters, taken using our Finger Lakes Instrumentation CCD, which has a 0.5degree field of view. These exposures are then stacked to create a single image for each filter, which are then stacked to create the final image. g-band data (denoted blue) were taken first, following by i (red) and r (green), with approximately 20-second delays in between each”.
Stay tuned for more colourful CCD images from our 16″ from the thirteen other students in this class.