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 +85 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 ~439,000 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 = 18:00 (17:05 to 18:55)

The following deep sky objects have been identified in the following image:

    M57  planetary nebula (the famous "Ring Nebula in Lyra")
    M92 globular star cluster
 

Figure 1.  Mosaic of 1 CCD images, each 27.2 x 18.1 degree, with 8 60-second exposures per location for the red and green images and 12 to 24 60-second blue exposures ("dark" image subtraction to remove CCD artifacts).  A SBIG ST-8E CCD was used with a Vivtar 28-mm EFL lens set to f/4.  MaxIm DL 3.0 software was used for image analysis and mosaic creation.  The observing were made on 2002.07.17/18 at my residence in Santa Barbara, CA.
 

    Sky Strip RA = 12:00 (276 Kb file size)
    Sky Strip RA = 13:25 (276 Kb file size)
    Sky Strip RA = 15:00 (427 Kb file size)
 

The mosaic, above, had to be rescaled to fit a computer monitor screen, it suffers a loss of clarity by specifying that the JPEG file bge compressed, and it had to be converted from 16-bit depth to 8-bit depth for browser display.  The following image shows what a portion of the mosaic looks like without the degradations of resolution and compression. It shows fainter stars (to magtnitude 11.5) and their colors are represented better.  The image scale is 32 "arc/pixel instead of 100 "arc/pixel.

Figure 2.  Three times zoom of the southern portion of the constellation Lyra with minimal compression and full resolution (32 "arc/pixel).  Vega is one of the brightest stars in the sky, and it "overwhelms" my sensitive CCD.

This site opened:  July 18, 2002.  Last Update:  July 18, 2002.