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 = 16:30 (15:05 to 17:55)

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:

    M92  globular star cluster
    M13  globular star cluster
    M10  globular star cluster
    M12  globular star cluster
    M107 globular star cluster
    M80  globular star cluster
    NGC 6543 planetary nebula

Half-way through the observations for this sky strip (going northward) I changed from black-and-white to color.  It turns out that using color filters allows for sharper images, since the cheap wide angle lens I'm using has an imperfect color correction, meaning that each color requries a different focus setting.  The image scales are slightly different for the red, green and blue images, so each filtered image must be rescaled before combining with the other images.  The net result is that the final result is sharper, and reaches fainter stars, in addition to being in color.  All future Sky Strips will be in color, therefore.

Figure 1.  Mosaic of 8 CCD images, each 27.2 x 18.1 degree, with four 60-second exposures per location for the black-and-white portion ("dark" image subtraction to remove CCD artifacts and flat field corrected to remove vignetting).  The color images are made from 12 blue images, 8 green images and 4 red exposures (all 60 seconds long). A SBIG ST-8E CCD was used with a Vivtar 28-mm EFL lens set to f/8 (B&W) and f/4 (color).  MaxIm DL 3.0 software was used for image analysis and mosaic creation.  The observing were made on 2002.07.07/08 and 2002.07.09/10 at East Camino Cielo Road 3400 feet ASL, 5 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, CA, and 2002.07.12/13, 2002.07.14/15 and 2002.07.15/16 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 a portion of Draco with minimal compression and full resolution (32 "arc/pixel).

This site opened:  July 16, 2002.  Last Update:  July 16, 2002.