Hi All, I put the new Serrurier truss scope to the test the other night by trying to get a high resolution view of the core of Omega Centauri. I can happily say that this new scope continues to deliver in bucket loads.
I captured 300 frames of 5 seconds each, of which I stacked the best 150. The result shows the core of the cluster in very high resolution and is a significant improvement over my earlier Omega Centauri images (none of which are wide field due to my miniscule chip size...) I have also inserted a scale at the top to illustrate the resolution of the image.
Image is available here:
http://upload.pbase.com/rolfolsen/im...19782/original
And an animated GIF showing Hubble comparison:
http://www.pbase.com/rolfolsen/image/134619793/original
It's interesting to compare with the famous Hubble image and notice an almost perfect match of features. The faint patterns in the background that look like image noise are in fact the combined light from groupings of smaller stars which are not individually resolved in this image. These patterns clearly correspond with the positions of the fainter stars in the image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Also visible are large numbers of blue stars of a uniform medium brightness. These are 'blue stragglers' - stars that are too hot and massive for the cluster's otherwise old age. Last year I posted an image showing these, but this new image is a vast improvement
Given the ancient origin of the cluster these stars should have turned into red giants by now, but it has been proposed that they are the results of mergers and mass transfers in the crowded environment of globular clusters. A main sequence star can exist for billions of years in the cluster and then later gain mass from a close orbiting binary, or as a result of a collision/merger, and thereby become more massive and hotter so that it now appears as a blue giant.
Hope you enjoy it, comments/critique is welcome as always.
Regards,
Rolf