Today the Night Sky Class took a solar spectrum using the SBIG SGS spectroscope. Mercury emission lines from a florescence lamp provided the calibration. Here is our calibrated image.
We had an imaging session on May 14th and captured a favorite galaxy, the Whirlpool Galaxy M51 in Canes Venatici. M51 is estimated to be about 23 million light years away from us. The image was take with a 12 inch LX200 Meade telescope and a SBIG ST10 CCD camera with 3×3 binning and 30 s exposure.
