Viewing Report 16th March 2025 Tenerife

20:34 – 06:30

Second Floor Terrace

Setup in the light polluted Adeje town north of the TF1. We are staying in a 3 story townhouse and I am imaging from the 2nd floor terrace.

New Camera

I have brought with me for the first time the ZWO ASI2600MC AIR and I am imaging with that using the small 220 built in guide chip for guiding and imaging through the Esprit 100 whilst trying to cut down the light pollution using the Antlia Triband RGB filter.

Light polluted Adeje

Focusing on completing my Messier collection, given the full moon, I am imaging M38 an open cluster. Taking 60s exposures to try and keep the chance of over exposing the stars, I am also West of the Meridian and at a starting imaging altitude of 55 degrees thus limiting the ingress of light into the telescope.

M38 Stacked and Annotated 101 x 60s

After 2 hours I moved on to M48 another open cluster. Again it was reasonably high at 42 degrees to allow for 2 hours of imaging before I hit the lights of the buildings. Imaging overhead is clearly what is needed after looking at the last few images of M38.

M48 Stacked and Annotated 102 x 60s

Another 2 hours completed and I then had a hard choice of what to image past the meridian, away from the Moon but before the lights of the buildings. I landed up targeting M109 to the left, along with NGC 3953 to the right of centre and NGC 391 to the far right. One of the stars making up the constellation of Ursa Major, 64 Gamma Uma can be seen. I went back to sleep and woke up around 7am to shut down the imaging run. A good first night.

M109 1 x 60s

Viewing Report 13th September 2024 Tenerife Adeje

21:00 – 23:00

My second night at the villa with the family. I’ve taken my Sharpstar 61 refractor with me this time with an effective focal length of 272mm. I normally use this a my guider for the Esprit 100 or 120. And I’ve placed it on the AM5 and have attached the trusty 50mm Skywatcher guide scope to it.

Ready to image

Luke has helped me setup this evening after managing to have an accident yesterday which caused me to have butterfly stitches to my shin 🤦‍♂️

So after about an hour of setting up, finding focus, working out the focal length and polar aligning we have set off to test the first image from this little setup. The FoV is 4.94 x 3.30 degrees.

Plate solve of the first image

NGC 7000 the North American Nebula that is almost overhead, thus removing problems with the pool lights that I have not yet worked out how to turn off.

We are taking 12 x 5mins with the ZWO ASI2600MC colour camera, cooled to -10℃ as the temperature outside is a balmy 21℃.

Single 5min exposure

Once done I will call it a night as I really need to turn off those pool lights.

Screenshot of 5min exposure

Darks – 6 x 300s

Flats – 12 x 0.35s

Single Flat