NGC 6302 Bug Nebula (Nik Szymanek)

NGC 6302 Bug Nebula

Another one from the archives!
This image dates back to 26-05-2006 and was taken using the 2-metre Faulkes Telescope North on Maui, Hawaii. This telescope and its counterpart in Australia were offered as robotic imaging systems to school children for educational outreach. I was involved with the Faulkes Telescope Project quite early on as a keen amateur astro-imager and was given lots of access to the telescopes.
This image was made up of just six 90-second exposures with an H-alpha filter along with something like 5-minutes exposure per RGB filter. Exposure times had to be kept short as there was no autoguider.
The seeing conditions weren't particularly good that night.
The CCD had a 1024 x1024 array of pixels binned 2 x 2 for these images. The FITS header reports a pixel size of 13.5 microns and an operating temperature of 156 Kelvin. I remember the cryogenic cooling features of the camera caused a lot of problems as did the observatory door blowing open on windy nights triggering intruder alarms and shutting down the system mid-way through an imaging run!
This is a slight reprocess of my original image using modern software.
The Faulkes Telescopes were later integrated into the Las Cumbres Global Telescope Network.
Nik Szymanek

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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
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Other
Unknown

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