ALHAMBRA Survey

[vicent_peris]

Hi all,

Here is my first professional work as the astrophotographer of the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Valencia (OAUV - Spain). We have published today the press release of the ALHAMBRA project. This survey is being done with the 3.5 meters telescope at the spanish observatory of Calar Alto; the objective is to have a very precise statistical data of the young Universe, as we will have about 650,000 galaxies, down to magnitude 26, on the complete image fields.

This survey is very special because the fields are being photographed with 20 adjacent filters, each one with a 31 nm. bandpass, so we will have a very precise information about the distribution of the light from the near UV to the near IR for each object.

The image I present below is from one of the four 4Kx4K CCDs of the LAICA camera, with an image scale of 0.225" per pixel. The processing work have been basically the reduction of 14 of the 20 filters (between 396 - 799 nm.) to the three primary colors, to emulate the color we would see the field with our eyes (light between 700 - 800 nm have been taken as pure red). All the processing have been done with PixInsight Standard.

You can see two small crops of the original image here:

http://c300d.pleiades-astrophoto.com/alhambra/Recorte1.jpg

http://c300d.pleiades-astrophoto.com/alhambra/Recorte2.jpg

And you can download the complete imagen and one illustration at 50% scale here:

http://c300d.pleiades-astrophoto.com/alhambra/AlhambraColor_100.jpg

http://c300d.pleiades-astrophoto.com/alhambra/Poster_050.jpg

For more information about the project, you can enter the webpage of the OAUV:

http://www.uv.es/obsast/alhambra/pressrelease.html

Or the Calar Alto webpage:

www.caha.es


All the images can be used, allways with the correct credits, of course.


Regards,
Vicent.