July 10, 2024 – IMT3b Observatory

Viewing report Travel to Tenerife Night 6 – Tuesday 9th July 2024

Started at 10pm

Focus position main scope 15,946

Ended at 5:30am

Very windy night with 1.6’ seeing! I started with NGC 5982 Draco triplet but the wind was too high at 48.25 km/s! Trailing stars everywhere and guiding was useless at 36”!! So paused imaging until the wind dropped slightly. I continued to monitor the situation from the Teide Observatory Grafana dashboard page here;

http://161.72.1.36/v2/d/cww_ot/common-weather-website-of-teide-observatory?orgId=1&refresh=1m

Back up in my room I can hear the wind whistling past my window. After another hour the conditions were no better so I set the mount to run all night across 3 objects and went to bed crossing my fingers the ASIAIR and AM5 mount behaved well.

I was then delighted by sunrise that I had captured some useful data, not as much as I had hoped but good news enough. I had captured ok data for M11 of 12 x 300s subs.

M11 single 5 min sub

I also grabbed 19 semi successful images of M22,

M22 single 5 min sub

and lastly only 8 not great frame of M30 at the beginning of the night which quite frankly need to be taken again.

M30 poor frame 5 mini sub

Viewing report Travel to Tenerife Night 5 – Monday 8th July 2024

Started to image at 10pm

Focus position main scope 12,315

Ended at 6am

Tonight started with 0.7’ seeing. I was going to start imaging on the Dragons of Ara, however when I slewed I realised it was behind the mountain to the South. So instead I moved slightly up to M19 to finish my run on that glob from yesterday for around an hour in the hope the Dragons would clear the mountain by then and still be West of the Meridian.

M19 single 5 min sub

So by 11:30pm the 🐉 nebula had cleared the mountain and so I started imaging it at some 10 degrees altitude. I was not going to bother capturing more data on other nights as it is very low and the stars are bloated to about 6 pixels rather than 3 pixels. That said, once stacked and Blur Exterminator process was run it was very pleasing. So I may try to capture some more data.

NGC 6188 Dragons of Art – 5 min sub

After 2 hours it was a mere 5 degrees above the horizon and the star size had increased from 3.32 pixels to 6.01 pixels so I decided to call it a day and move to the globular cluster M28 at the top of the lid of the teapot.🫖

M28 single 5 min sub

After that I went on to grab 10 frames of the glob M30 before twilight.

M30 single 5 min sub

Viewing report Travel to Tenerife Night 4 – Sunday 7th July 2024

Started at 10pm

Focus position main scope 12,233

Ended observing at 6:10am

A beautiful night with 0.8’ seeing. Started with a set of globs, namely more data for M62,

M62 single 5 min sub

a new globular cluster M80

M80 single 5 min sub

and globular cluster M19,

M19 single 5 min sub

then finally the Crescent nebula which I managed to grab just shy of 3 hours on. I ran all the way to twilight at around 6am and then packed up for bed by 7am.