The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) is a research telescope designed to take very precise measurements of the amount of light emitted from the object of interest that reaches onto its CCD camera. However, the camera we use does have a reasonable field of view (twelve arc minute square) and it has very sharp optics; so on occasion, when there are a few minutes to spare, observers at the telescope will sometimes direct the telescope to some favorite astronomical delight.

Color images are made by combining images taken through red, green, and blue filters. On occasion you can see an asteroid moving through the field of view as a series of dots of first one, then another, color.

Astronomers who to make it their business to create excellent images of astronomical objects will spend an evening taking hundreds of images and then “stack” them to get extra-fine resolution. By contrast, the images we show here are usually no more than one snapshot through each color filter, no stacking except to create the full color range. The beauty of the images that you see here even with such a casual approach speaks to the very high quality of the imaging that is possible at the VATT.

Click on any individual image to get a full resolution view.