Tag: AM5

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

Viewing report 8th & 9th March 2023 Tenerife Los Gigantes Villa

Between 9pm and 12:30am both nights

View from the Villa facing South West

A week with the family in Tenerife afforded me the opportunity to test out for the 2nd time this year the Skywatcher 100 Esprit on the AM5 harmonic mount with the ASIAIR in control and the ASI2600MC with a new Antlia Triband RGB Ultra filter.

Travel Rig

Over the period of the week I picked 2 nights when I wanted to observe. Because of the clement environment of Tenerife and the Canaries and unlike the UK, you can decide when to go out and image as almost all nights are clear, the weather warm, around 22 deg Celsius and the bed not that far away from the pool. Given when we were on holiday which was decided around other activities, the Moon phase was Full.

Night time flood lit pitches

The one problem with renting a villa is when the owners will not pinpoint where on a map it is. There is normally a reason. In this case it was because of the proximity of the local sports buildings. A swimming pool to the front of the villa including a floodlit pitch and 2 more flood lit pitches to the left and right of the villa at the rear.

Impact of flood lighting

So yes it was bright, very bright, as can be seen on the villa party wall.

Full Moon and Floodlights

So given all that light pollution I was then pleasantly surprised how well the final image came out of the singular target I chose. NGC 2244, the Rosette Nebula.

NGC 2244 Rosette Nebula – 6 hours

I exposed for some 75 x 300s over the 2 nights. All the images were on the West side of the Meridian to make it easier without a flip.

Crop of cluster

I found stacking 75 images instead of just the first night of 30+ images gave a much smoother background and nebula, much less noise and easier to work with the data.

Wider crop including dust

So not a bad photo for Full Moon and 3 flood lit pitches. I look forward to testing out the kit at the top of the mountain later in the year under New Moon dark skies.