Steward Observatory's 61" f/13.5
Cassegrain Reflector
This is the 61" Steward Observatory's 61" f/13.5 Cassegrain Reflector on Mt. Bigelow in the mountains just above Tucson Arizona. I help out with the University of Arizona's Astronomy Camp program that uses this telescope, and so on those wonderful occasions I get to connect my Olympus OM1 and take some shots through this mighty scope. This telescope was designed to take high resolution pictures of the moon for the Apollo Space program back in the 1960's. The polar alignment, tracking and optics on this scope are incredible. It does a fantastic job with small planetary nebula, lunar photography, and shots of the planets. At a focal length of 20,916mm the field of view with a 35mm camera is only a few arc minutes, so it is not the best scope to use for larger objects. But for the planets and the moon, having a 3 arc minute field of view at f/13.5 lets you do exposures of 1/125th of a second on Saturn where a smaller telescope using eyepiece projection to achieve the same image scale would need 4 or 5 seconds.
If you want more information about attending an astronomy camp (They have a kids and an adult camp) click here.
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Last modified: October 13 1997
Copyright ©1997 Chris Vedeler
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ckvedeler@access4less.net.