South Celestial Pole

(move the mouse over thumbnails - please be patient until image downloads)

This image is neither deep, nor impressive by itself, but it is unique because of the fact that it includes within the South Celestial Pole. Situated in area that doesn't contain many bright stars in constellation Octans, this particular part of the southern hemisphere is difficult to image with a classical German mount (like DDM85), because of the tracking inaccuracy near to the pole. In fact every star situated more than a half degrre from the pole was trailed. To get a little rounder stars we used a technique that can be described as "radial deconvolution". To make this, two layers containing the same image were blended in "darken" mode, then rotated using as pivot point the Celestial Pole.On mouseover can be seen an annotated version of the image showing the equatorial reference lines and some of the stars' catalogue numbers. Finaly, the third image is done without alignment in the stack, which results in trailed stars. North is outward on this image :)

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