More pix: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey 2.5 meter telescope

[thewayne]

I shot these about 3 hours ago, got home a little while ago and did a little bit of Photoshop on them. The exposures are 30 seconds at f4: the clouds were moving pretty fast. These were shot with my Canon 6D with the 17-40 zoom at 17mm

The telescope is the Sloan 2.5 meter, not my wife's 3.5.

More telescope photos, and others, at Wayne West Photography.com.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Oh, nice! Even aside from the utility of a long exposure in twilight, the racing clouds effect does work beautifully on the first especially.

(Nifty wind baffle design, too)

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Quite observant to realize that's a wind baffle. One of the original programs for the Sloan involved a spectrograph that could read dozens of spectra simultaneously via a plug plate that used fiber optic cables and an aluminum 1 meter filter disk: the holes in the disk matched the layout of what they wanted spectra of, then a fiber cable ran to the spectrograph. They would point at one part of the sky and follow it for an extended period of time. The baffle prevents roiling air from screwing up the readings.

I hope you get up here some day, you wouldn't believe the robotics involved in changing that filter cartridge. It's tres cool. Plus the fact that the 'dome' for the 2.5 is a barn that retracts from the telescope on railroad ties.