Andjelko Kovacic
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Picture
of the Month: The Lagoon
Nebula / www.croastro.com
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I am a
doctor and work as a general practitioner at the local
surgery. I live in Donja Stubica, a small town with the
population of 6,000 inhabitants, in the vicinity of the
Croatia's capital Zagreb. Astrophotography is what I do
most, what attracts me and fascinates me. Like many other
amateur astronomists in the world I moved into my own
observatory on the hill Kamenjak, about 2km from Donja
Stubica and 270m above the sea level. It is surrounded
by my grandfather's vineyard and built on our wine-house.
The dome is 3m in diameter and built by the local firm
Metalis. It is a metal construction covered with copper.
The instrument
that I first used was a Celestron 8 on the Losmandy GM8
mount. In summer 2002 I changed it for a Celestron 9.25.
I also use the Celestron refractor 102mm/f5 (as finder
and guidescope). For taking pictures I use the Celestron/SBIG
CCD Pixel 237 camera.
Real astronomical
observatories are scarce in Croatia, and most of them
are equipped with old and poor quality equipment. The
first observatory in Croatia dates from 1903. It is placed
in Zagreb and is equipped with the 130mm Zeiss refractor,
which is as old as the observatory itself. The leading
observatory in Croatia is Observatory Visnjan. It is a
member of the Spaceguard Foundation for discovering NEOs
- Near Earth Objects. Its telescope will be soon enlarged
to 1.5m diameter, which will be the biggest in Croatia.
Shooting
with CCD camera is still making its baby-steps because,
except for the richer astronomical societies, many amateur
astronomers do not have such cameras. Although there are
no large problems with light pollution in Croatia, some
activities are slowly being introduced to inform the public
about the problem, and to encourage the use of ecological
lighting which will not destroy the beauty of the sky
at night.
The enthusiasm
and will to explore space and discover the universe is
strong in Croatia and with time and hard work the better
results and new discoveries will come, too.
The Lagoon
Nebula is one of my favourite nebulae and also a most
spectacular object in constellation Sagittarius. Diffuse
nebulae, like M8, are sites where new stars are being
born from dusty molecular clouds. The Lagoon nebula is
associated with open cluster NGC 6530 which contains several
dozen hot new stars just formed. I obtained my image of
M8 through a Celestron 8 on a Losmandy GM mount. I also
used a Meade f3.3 Focal Reducer/Field Flattener
and a Celestron/SBIG Pixcel 237 CCD camera. The image
is assembled from luminance: Red, Green and Blue
components. The luminance images (black and white)
are exposed for 22 x 30 secs with 1 x 1 binning (640 x
480 pixels); each of the RGB components are exposed
for 200 secs with 2 x 2 binning (320 x 240 pixels). Field
of view is 24.1 x 18.47 arc mins (0.4
x 0.3 degree). Image is processed in CCD Soft v5,
AIP4Win and Adobe Photoshop software.
Article reproduced from CIRCA
103, Spring 2003, pp.61-62.
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