Empty Space?

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has just released a 300 million pixel image of a one square degree patch of 'empty sky' that is actually teeming with stars and galaxies. The region of sky that has been imaged is in the southern constellation of the Crater between Virgo, Corvus and Hydra. The image was created from 714 frames taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-m telescope at La Silla in Chile as part of the ESO Deep Public Survey. ESO have provided a pretty neat zoom feature so that you can explore the full image. It is really quite impressive and I have included a small portion of it below.

Empty Field
A small section of colour image of the Deep 3 empty field observed with the Wide-Field Camera on the MPG/ESO 2.2-m telescope at La Silla. The image is the combination of 714 frames for a total exposure time of 64.5 hours obtained through four different filters (B, V, R, and I). CREDIT: MPG/ESO 2.2-m + WFI
However, looking at the brighter stars in the image, I can't help but feel that the optics of the instrument are producing images of the secondary mirror with its support legs.

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Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Friday 14th Apr 2006 (15:33 UTC) | 1 Comment | Permalink

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