The following image is best viewed with your monitor display set to a resolution of 1280x1024 (which will cause the sky strips to be as wide as your screen).

This web page has one north-south scan, from -33 to +90 declination and a little beyond. The width of the strip is 27.2 degrees (or 1:49 of right ascension at the celestial equator).  The sky area of this strip represents a mere 7% of the entire heavens sky area.  I've reduced the "JPEG-quality" to 50% in order to keep file size small, but they still are ~690,000 bytes which is large for modem users.  This web page, and links to other sky strips, is therefore meant for wide-bandwidth users.  Sorry, modem people.  Observing information about each image is included below each image.  Other sky strip images will be added as links at the bottom of this web page.

Let me suggest that you download the sky strip image and view it with your favorite viewer that allows zoom.  My favorite viewer is ACDsee (available for free at ACD Systems ).  It fills the screen and zooms by simply pressing the <Numeric +> key.

Right Ascencion = 12:00 (11:05 to 12:55)

Since 10th magnitude objects are registered in this image, many "deep sky" objects, such as distant galaxies, are shown.  The following deep sky objects have been identified in the following image:

    M81 & M82
    M68
    M104 "Sombrero Galaxy"
    M49
    M85
    M94
    M106
    NGC 4631

Mosaic of 8 CCD images, each 27.2 x 18.1 degree, with three 60-second exposures per location ("dark" image subtraction to remove CCD artifacts and flat field corrected to remove vignetting).  A SBIG ST-8E CCD was used with a Vivtar 28-mm EFL lens set to f/8.  MaxIm DL 3.0 software was used for image analysis and mosaic creation.  The observing were made on 2002.05.14/15 at Figueroa Mountain, 4528 feet ASL, 45 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, CA.

    Sky Strip RA = 13:25 (276 Kb file size)
    Sky Strip RA = 15:00 (427 Kb file size)

This site opened:  May 16, 2002.  Last Update:  June 6, 2002.