5 weeks ago (May 2015) we successfully installed 2 of our 0.4-meter class telescopes on Mount Teide in Tenerife. Since then we have been commissioning these telescopes, getting them ready for autonomous, robotic operations.
A couple of members of our science team, Elisabeth Heinrich-Josties and Rob Siverd, took these 2 beautiful pictures on 24 June. They wanted to find targets that could cover enough of the field of view of the telescope (~0.4x0.5 deg) to be interesting. Elisabeth scoured wikipedia articles, where she found the M27, Dumbbell Nebula. She was then pointed to the 2MASS Large Galaxy Atlas by Rob as perhaps a better place to find suitable targets! This is where she found NGC6946.
M27 Dumbbell Nebula
NGC6946
Both exposures are 120s, and no filter was used. They also took a few calibration images of the same duration and combined the good ones.
After this calibration (which involved dark subtracting and trimming the over scan region), the last step was getting the scaling right. Rob and Elisabeth used the astronomical software DS9 to produce the images, using a log scaling on the nebula, and a square root on the galaxy. The most time consuming part was tweaking the scale parameters to get the structure of the galaxy to come out, while still being able to see the background stars.
We look forward to having many more amazing images from this new observatory.
