A Few Pictures from Our Old ST7xe CCD Camera

This camera was our workhorse for almost 10 years. But now it's a bit dated. And, it requires 3 filters and 3 separate exposures to take color pictures. And the image size is small - only 752x512 pixels. We've moved on. But I can't part with some of these old shots, and they may be useful to compare with pictures from our new SBIG ST2000 and ST4000 series cameras.

The Crab Nebula. Dec 1, 2004 Nancee and I took an LRGB sequence, stacked it in MaxIm D/L and did initial color balancing there, then imported to Photoshop 7 for some more adjusting of the levels, sharpness, color balance, and image size/resolution. And just for fun, here's another version - run through Photoshop's watercolor filter and re-touching the hue/saturation.

The Dumbell Nebula. I took this shot on Sept 15, 2004. 5 minutes in the clear filter, with some post-processing in Photoshop. ST7XE on the 12" with "clear" filter.

NGC 891 in Andromeda. I got this shot of one of my favorite galaxies with the 12" LX200 and ST7XE combination, on a moonlit night. The moon and usual light pollution at Cabrillo kept the exposure short - 5 minutes, making for a grainy, low signal/noise image, alas.

Supernova 2004dw Sept 15, '04, a type II supernova in the distant, dust-obscured edge-on spiral galaxy UGC 11394 in Lyra. The supernova is ~17.1 magnitude, shown left of the tick. Stars as faint as 19th magnitude are captured on this photo.

The Moon. Nov 17, 2004 we had stable but foggy weather. Michael took this picture of the southern highlands of the moon using our ST-7 CCD camera on the 12". A 0.4 second exposure in the clear filter. The picture was post-processed in Photoshop; levels / brightness / contrast / and sharpened with the unsharp mask tool.

Uranus. Jay Friedland took this picture of the planet Uranus on 9/15/04. This is a quick grab; only 4 seconds long. Still, it shows the moons Titania and Oberon flanking the planet, and likely another moon above these. The moons this night lined up along a steep diagonal.