The commissioning work at the Sedgwick Reserve Observatory continues. This is the latest image taken by the LCOGT team working on the telescope.
The object is the Trifid nebula, also known as M20 (Messier object 20). The observation was made close to the local meridian, at about 1:00am local time. The instrument used was an SBIG camera and the image is an unbinned, single frame, using red filter for 2 minutes, unguided. The plate scale was too tight to include the adjacent blue reflection nebula component of the object.
Work will continue this week to fine-tune the Right Ascension drive and create a better pointing model.
Thanks to the observers: Pickles, Walker, Brunner, Ryu, and Martinez.
