Much like the genie in Aladdin's lamp, The Aladin Sky Atlas (Aladin) can
perform magic with your deep sky images. Amateur astronomers, with
relatively modest equipment, can image surprisingly faint objects.
Typically, these faint background objects are simply refereed to as...
"faint fuzzies."In a deeply exposed amateur image, it is common to
see galaxies down to magnitude 23 and fainter, with a total galaxy count
in the thousands. Within a single galaxy, Aladin can identify HII
regions, planetary nebulae, star clusters and more. Extragalactic
objects may include other galaxies as well as quasars. The author has
previously identified a quasar with a red-shift value of
3.68. This
equates to a light travel time of about 11 to 12 billion years.
Here's a short
description of the process to create an image, as shown below.
Save
the JPEG image as flipped vertically, relative to the FITS image.
-
Execute the Aladin Sky Atlas. This process works best with
Aladin, Version 6.005. See below, for a download link.
-
Drag
and drop the plate-solved FITS image onto Aladin's opening screen.
-
Copy
the World Coordinates System (WCS) data from the FITS image to the
clipboard.
-
Drag
and drop the JPEG image on top of the FITS image, in Aladin.
-
Apply
the WCS data to the JPEG image.
-
Load
data from various databases to identify objects in the FITS or JPEG
image.
Download the detailed tutorial (.pdf) file.
(2.94 MB)
View
the detailed tutorial .pdf file online. (3.41 MB)
Download
The latest version of Aladin
