Welcome to the new USask Astronomy blog site! This site is a place for students and instructors at USask to post about the things going on in our Astronomy classes.
To kick off the site, for this first post I’ve selected the above image of the star forming region IC 2948 (which is currently also set as the background image for the site). This image was created using data I collected in the spring of 2022 using the Skynet Robotic Telescope Network‘s Prompt6 telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (the right-most telescope in Figure 1, a picture I took in May 2022 while we were testing the telescopes during a maintenance trip).
To create the image of IC 2948, I combined data taken with Johnson/Cousins BVRI broadband filters and H-alpha and OIII narrowband images using Skynet’s Afterglow software. The B, V and R images are coloured blue, green and red, respectively, and colours were adjusted according to photometric measurements of stars in the field, and corrected for interstellar reddening to display colours that accurately represent what the stars should look like up close. I then added in the I-band image and coloured it with a heat map, giving the stars that shine most brightly in infrared an orange hue. Finally, the diffuse gas in the nebula is was enhanced to bring out its structure (Bok globules, cone nebula, etc), and colourised using the naturally occurring colours of hydrogen and oxygen emission due to fluorescence from nearby hot young stars.
My hope with this site is that it provides a useful outlet for showing off things like this; the beautiful and physically interesting products of our labours. Images that aren’t just pretty, but which tell interesting physical tales about the phenomena we see, updates on instrumentation from trips to the observatories we use to collect these data, and related data products that we are producing in our Astronomy classes, such as the HR diagrams and isochrone models our first-year students are currently working on, which will be the subject of the first set of posts to come very shortly on this blog.
Enjoy!