Another clear night last night – what is going on?? Fired up the miniWASP array, this time using the 2 x Canon 200mm prime lenses and the Trius M26C 10-Megapixel OSC CCDs. Target – the rich Milky Way region in Lacerta. I was originally going to take a 2-framer of this region JUST showing a huge star density, but when I looked at the region on a planetarium program I saw that this was not a good choice. If I took the frame to the right, rather than to the left – then instead of just having a mass of stars, I would also get a pile of dark nebulosity as well as the Cocoon nebula. So I took the right hand frame. Left hand frame was 16 x 10-minute subs and right hand frame was 14 x 10-minute subs, so a total exposure time of 5-hours but with only 2 and a half hours of actual (real) imaging time. Registar says there are 250,000 stars in this image.
