GRAND PRIZE WINNER: To create this image, astrophotographer Tony Hallas made 10 vertical panels through a 14.5-inch telescope and nine horizontal “background” panels through a 6-inch Stellarvue telescope. Each vertical panel combined seven 25-minute exposures through L, R, G, and B filters; the horizontal panels combined five or six 20-minute exposures through L, R, G, and B filters. The total exposure time thus equaled approximately 19 hours, and the entire project (including image processing) took 4 months. (14.5-inch RC Optical Systems Classical Cassegrain Carbon Tube Telescope at f/8 paired with a Santa Barbara Instrument Group [SBIG] STL-11000 CCD camera, 6-inch Stellarvue refractor at f/7.9 with an SBIG ST-10E CCD camera, Astrodon filters, Astro-Physics 1200GTO German equatorial mount)
Tony Hallas
Astronomy‘s 2009 Astroimaging Contest was a resounding success. You can see all the winning submissions and read more about them in the September 2009 issue of Astronomy magazine. But we didn’t have enough pages to print all the images we received, so we’re putting them all up on the website.
