Atmospheric seeing: Why we put telescopes in space (See description)

Описание: A few houses around 64 km (40 miles) away, during twilight. The trees in the bottom of the frame are around 37 km (23 miles) away. The heat-haze like effect is caused by air currents in the atmosphere, which are the limiting factor for ground based astronomical observations. This effect is why astronomers will spend billions to get telescopes into space.

Larger version:    • Atmospheric seeing: Why we put telescopes ...  

Equipment: C9.25 telescope, ASI533 camera, and 0.63 focal reducer. The telescope was set up behind a window.

Each frame was exposed for 50 ms, at F/6.3. No post processing (except debayering) was done, this is the raw image as it came out of the camera.

Each pixel received an average of 4.7 photons/exposure, which results in a large amount of shot noise.