I decided to see if it was possible to capture an image a brown dwarf with a small scope. As it turns out, it is! Brown dwarves emit most of their light in the near-infrared and infrared, so you shouldn't use an IR cut filter when capturing them. However, you can use the IR cut filter to verify the unusual nature of the the little "star" in your image.

First, I captured the field with an IR-cut filter, then reimaged it without the IR cut filter and could immediately see this little brown dwarf pop into view near the nice little spiral PGC 52318. It had an interesting effect on my imaging sensor too, showing a bluish and reddish-pink tinge with the IR-Cut filter removed. The blue and green bayer filters in my RGB camera pass significant IR and near-IR ,which is why I use the IR cut filter to improve color saturation when imaging "normal" DSOs.

The first "A" version of the image is heavily annotated and has an inset showing the with/without IR cut filter (note that the "with" IR cut filter image is stretched to try to show anything at all there.) I marked a few quasars, including one faint 21.4 magnitude quasar, SDSS J143942.05+640355.8, with redshift of z=2.08. That puts it at about 11.3 billion light years away! You can see it as a tiny pale blue star. This was a good night at home, so with the almost 39 minutes of data here, the faintest objects are close to 22nd magnitude. Many distant quasars have a pale blue color because of the way the Lyman-alpha Hydrogen lines in UV light around the 100nm wavelength range originally emitted by the objects have been redshifted into the visible blue. There is also a faint galaxy that may have an active galactic nucleus (AGN) of type BL Lac. Just a smudge with bright stellar center!

The brown dwarf I targeted in this image is of spectral type L0.2V. Considering how bright it was in a single 10 minute live-stack, I am going to try for some fainter L class brown dwarves and maybe even see if I can image a fainter T class brown dwarf.

The "B" version of the image is the full resolution (never compressed) unannotated version. There are a total of 4 images combined here, produced by stacking a total of 1550 1.5 second exposures with an image scale of 0.5 arc seconds per pixel. I tried had to enter half this number of frames, and put the sub length at 3 seconds since Astrobin won't accept fractional exposure lengths.