Well after a great day out visiting amongst other telescopes the MONS where we have observed before, I setup and waiting for the last night to become dark. The night was truly stunning at 0.7’ seeing, warm and calm. Low humidity was effecting us, else all the other elements were playing ball. I setup and captured the Moon
Moon
before heading over to Comet Olbers first.
Comet Olbers
After this I set a run on the Dragons again so to add to my data from the other night.
NGC 6188 Dragons
Once this was set and the rest of the plan was in place I headed off to bed at 1am and left the setup capturing some additional data on both M30
M30 Globular Cluster
and M11.
M11 Globular Cluster
I then went on to image M54 which is really small at 1.6 arc minutes.
M54 Globular Cluster
Lastly I grabbed some data on M14 which is a slightly larger globular cluster at 2.6 arc minutes.
M14 Globular Cluster
In the morning I reviewed the data and unfortunately due to the altitude of some of the objects I did have to reject quite a few frames, however I did capture enough to create a decent image.
So I have arrived in Tenerife and for a few nights only I am up at the MONS observatory, using the plateau (concrete platform with power) outside the dome.
It was dark when I arrived at 20:15 so I am setting up by head torch and given the tripod and mount and scope are all in bits it has taken some time to put it back together.
I setup in the corner where Bob normally sits as thee were a bunch of students using the scopes normally kept in the sheds outside. After setting up I panicked as I had forgot my UK to EU plug ! I asked the lady leading the student outreach and she let me in the MONS and I searched for a plug and found one, despite everything being emptied out due to the MONS having work done to it. However on testing the plug it did not work 🙁
A call to the operator did not produced anything. So I tore down the scope and packed in the car, very disheartened. As I was just about to head off the operator arrived with another plug ! I took my laptop and tried it, but it did not work either. It took a while to work out but of course the power had been turned off from the fuse box and flicking the RCD produced power and so reluctantly I emptied the car and went about setting back up 🙁
By this time it was approaching midnight and I had been at this for some 4 hours. I started the laptop, found I was pointing almost spot on to Polaris, so using my Polemaster it took a few minutes to adjust. I then set about slewing to a nearby object, syncing and then finding a guide star, at this point my troubles where just about to begin. It was now 1am.
So after setting the temperature of the camera to -25℃ and the gain to 7 and offset to 20 I found the scope would not guide. It was bouncing all over the place, some of it was the wind, but some of it was erratic behaviour of the mount, so it seemed like it was overcorrecting. I started to change some of the settings but t no avail. All I could do was to shortened the exposure to around 90 seconds and try and get some data, even if the stars were slightly trailed. I would try to take a longer look at the guiding tomorrow night.
Not so great guiding
So I slewed to one of the objects I was to target, a galaxy called NGC 891 in Andromeda and started collecting data. All in all I grabbed 44 images before the guider was causing so much of an issue even 90 seconds was too long (processed image below)
I then slewed to M45 in Taurus but still the guiding problems persisted. I took 4 x 90 second images and then decided to call it a night at around 3:30am.
Now for packing up the scope and the 1 hour 20 minute drive back down the mountain. How I miss observing from Hacienda on La Palma!
