"Bellatrix" Astronomical Observatory

M42 - Orion nebula

Gianluca Masi, Ceccano (FR) Italy

Center for Backyard Astrophysics - Italian Station

Italian version

Last update: 21 September 2005

The Planetary Society awards Gianluca Masi with the Shoemaker NEO Grant!

First image and movie from a small scope of 2003 UB313, the just-discovered object larger than Pluto!

Deep Impact hits the Tempel 1: the comet rebrightnens !!!

The Rosetta fly by movie wins the second ESA prize!

What's new today ?

Rosetta spacecraft: movie and image

Comet C/2004 Q2 (Machholz): movie!

(4179) Toutatis movies!

(25143) Itokawa photometry!

Comets C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) and C/2002 T7 (LINEAR) !

Asteroid 1999 KW4 movie and lightcurve!!!

Asteroid (21795) Masi !

! McNeil's Nebula and a few new variable stars close to M78 !

WZ Sge extremely rare superoutburst!

Masi's variable star near M27

1� Virtual Meeting on Amateur Astronomy

Welcome to the site of the "Bellatrix" Astronomical Observatory, managed by Gianluca Masi (note about the author). Here you will find a lot of astronomical images, services and information about our activities. Very remarkable is the Hale-Bopp image gallery. The observatory is also the Italian station of the Center for Backyard Astrophysics (Columbia University, New York - USA), a network of telescopes dedicated to cataclysmic variable stars' photometry. Also, the observatory is member of the VSNET Collaboration Team (Kyoto University, Japan), mainly related to cataclysmic variables. Your suggestions or comments about this site will be very much appreciated.

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Instruments

The main telescope installed at the observatory is a Celestron/Losmandy CG-11, a 280 mm SC telescope, used at several focal lenghts (f/20, f/10, f/6.3, f/3.3). It is mainly used for the research activities (astrometry and CCD photometry). To image the Hale-Bopp (and other objects), a smaller, 6-inch Vixen SP R-150S f/5 newtonian reflector has been used. A SBIG ST-7 CCD camera is employed as detector, and completes the principal instrumentation.
For data acquisition, elaboration and analysis several software packages are used: CCDOPS (SBIG), CCDSoft (Software Bisque), QMiPS32 (by Christian Buil), Astrometrica (by Herbert Raab) and IDL (RSI). TheSky (Software Bisque) is used to program the observing sessions and to control the main telescope with an encoder system.
The observing site (Ceccano) is heavily affected by light pollution.

Hale-Bopp images

Images are posted here in inverse chronological order. They are in JPG format, with no high resolution. Info about taking astronomical images are available. If you need high resolution images, please ask me for them by e-mail. Click on the image to see the full version. Please, contact me if you wish to publish one of them. This is valid for all the images presented in this site.

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