The Pine Mountain Observatory Deep Field

Presenter: Ellis Mimms – Physics

Faculty Mentor(s): Scott Fisher

Session: (In-Person) Oral Panel—Uniquely Their Own, Poster Presentation

The Hubble Space Telescope is a telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit as part of international cooperation between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA). Weighing over 10,886 kilograms and containing a 2.4 diameter meter mirror, it is one of the largest, most versatile space telescopes in the world and one of the most renowned. While Hubble has been used to observe many different celestial objects and phenomena, one of the most famous pieces of data to come from it is known as the Hubble Deep Field Image. For 10 straight days in 1995, Hubble stared at a tiny, nearly empty patch of sky near the Big Dipper. The telescope gathered all the light it could, slowly building the picture that would come to be known as the Hubble Deep Field Image. This image, showing a sliver of our early universe, contains over 3,000 galaxies, large and small, shapely and amorphous, burning in the depths of space. With the Pine Mountain Observatory Deep Field (PMODF), we have created our own deep field image, instead imaging the central region of the Coma Cluster to determine how many galaxies we can detect within it. With our data, we have been able to determine to what magnitude the telescopes at Pine Mountain can see into space. Collecting around 10 hours of data, The Pine Mountain Observatory Deep Field represents some of the deepest imagery taken at Pine Mountain Observatory to date.

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