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McDonald Observatory in Ft. Davis, TX I visit this observatory every year when I attend the annual Texas Star Party. |
This dome houses the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, which is a very unique optical design. Instead of being one large mirror it is made up of independent mirrors that work in a single or multiple arrays. The scope chassis does not slew vertically. Only the mirrors move. This giant telescope cost far less than other scopes of the same aperture due to reuse of existing objects.
This image was my first ever HDR image. To accomplish the High Dynamic Range, I took three bracketed photos in quick succession. Then I used the Merge HDR functionality in PhotoShop CS3 to combine the images. With the merged photo, I adjusted the HDR curves when converting from 32-bit to 16-bit, and increase saturation for yellow and blue to arrive at this result.