Our first self-built telescope in 1975
Our first self-built telescope in 1975
The Omega group was born with its name in 1975,
from the meeting of two boys united by the common interest in the Astronomy.
With limited resources a small refractor telescope
was used for performing regular observations of double stars.
Today the group is made up of five members, working
always together and also with various associations of Amateur Astronomers
.
Our site of observations from Palermo
Our Group started the systematical
observation of galaxies for the searching of extragalactic supernovae in
1992.
First only visually, using an SC
10" F/6.3 telescope equipped with digital pointing, then using a CCD Sbig
ST4 camera.
At the present our searching instruments
are: a Meade LX200 10" F/6.3 (normally used at F/4.5) and a CCD ISI800-HS
camera equipped with a Kodak sensor and a filter wheel. The magnitude that
we can reach using these intruments, in about 90 sec. of exposure, permits
us to make our observations from the town center, from the house of a member
of ours so we can perform the observations regularly and frequently.
To manage the observative session
we use two PC's, linked to the telescope, and the CCD together. For this
purpose a special software, called RICERCA
, has been designed to execute all the pointing operations, image acquisition
and data storage fully automatically. ...
The latest version of this software is also capable of centering the object, by using the mouse precisely and quickly, in order to accelerate all the operations preceeding the CCD image acquisition.
