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 -23 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 ~427,000 bytes which is large for modem users.  A higher quality version is available from the webmaster.  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 = 15:00 (14:05 to 15:55)

Since 11th 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:

    NGC 5907 (galaxy)
    M101 (galaxy)
    NGC 5466 (globular cluster)
    M5 (globular cluster)

Mosaic of 7 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 (using Digital Development/FFT Low Pass/Mild to extend the dynamic range in the final 8-bit representation).  The observing were made on 2002.07.02/03 next to the cement cistern on East Camino Cielo Road, near the FAA Station, 3400 feet ASL, 10 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, CA.

    Sky Strip 12:00 (692 Kb file size)
    Sky Strip 13:35 (276 Kb file size)

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