IFA Ideas prize payoff
Mads Fredslund Andersen, SAC and SONG, received the IFA Ideas prize for 2015 for a small piggyback telescope intended for the Tenerife based SONG telescope. Here is a beautiful example of the result.
The suggestion:
Mounting a small 15 cm diameter telescope (SkyCam-2) piggyback on the SONG telescope would enable us to take large field images of the areas of the sky observed by SONG for other reasons.
A result:
One of the 4 stars in the Orion Nebula "Trapeze" is regularly observed by the telescope, and is simultaneously imaged by the SkyCam-2.
The picture shows the central parts of the Orion Nebula, with the Trapezium at the very center. It is stacked from some 350 single images. 100 of them are 10 sec exposures in each of the red, green and blue filtres, giving the colours of the image. Supplementing this are 35 images exposed 60 sec each, giving depth and further details in the image.
Image Credit: Mads Fredslund Andersen/SONG/AU.