| 4 | | Right here, on top of the Heidelberg Koenigstuhl, the MPIA disposes of a reflector telescope with an aperture of 70 cm which has been dubbed KING - Königstuhl Instrument for Night sky Gazing / zum Nachthimmel-Gucken. |
| | 5 | It is currently equipped with a scientific grade 2kx2k back-illuminated, nitrogen-cooled SITe CCD -- identical to cameras used e.g. at Calar Alto Observatory. With a pixel size of 13umx13um it provides a field of view of 16.3x16.3 arcmin. A specially crafted manual filter slider allows unvignetted observations through a wide range of filter, including the standard series of UBVRI as well as an SDSS z' filter and a superb collection of high-performance narrow band interference filters for OII,OIII, H beta, H alpha, SII and SII-continuum (off-line passband). |
| | 6 | |
| | 7 | Typical seeing conditions are around 2 arcsec in the visible, but can be as good as 1 arcsec. Being located quite outside the city the brightening of the sky due to street illumination is acceptable, and using one of the interference filters gives a pitch-black sky indeed, allowing the acquisition of stunning images of emission nebulae like e.g. the Crab Nebula M1 shown on this page. |
