Tag: Parador

Viewing report Travel to Tenerife Night 7 – Wednesday 10th July 2024

10pm – 6:30am

Focus position main scope 12,323

Catch up images from last night include

  • NGC 6188 Dragons of Ara – 24 x 300s
  • M30 – 10 x 300s
  • M11 – 12 x 300s

New objects for tonight below

  • Comet Olbers (Various images)
  • M54 Glob – 24 x 300s
  • M14 Glob – 12 x 300s

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.

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.

Crescent Nebula 48 x 5 min subs

Crop of Crescent

Viewing report Travel to Tenerife Night 3 – Saturday 6th July 2024

Started imaging at 22:20

Focus position main scope 12,330

I ended my observing at 6:15am

Tonight started with low cloud making it slightly hazy although the seeing was around 0.7’.

I found setting the guider to a shorter exposure of 3s improves the guide graph considerably.

Makarian’s Chain – Final stacked image from 3 nights of data

I took another hour of Markarian’s Chain before moving on to M4 for another hour of data.

M4 single 5 min sub

Next I slewed to the first new object for tonight M62 another glob very close to M4. I took 12 images of M62 the globular cluster in Ophiuchus.

M62 single 5 min sub

All was going really well so I moved on to M39 the Open Cluster Cygnus and being high up I took 2 hours of data.

M39 single 5 mins sub

Lastly before bed I took my first set of data on the Crescent Nebula NGC 6888

NGC 6888 Crescent Nebula single 5 min sub

Viewing report Travel to Tenerife Night 2 – Friday 5th July 2024

Started imaging at  10pm

Focus position main scope 12,327

Camera temperature -15℃

Ended imaging at  5:45am

Very calm night 0.7’ seeing and at the start little to no wind. The temperature was around 16-17℃ all night.

Started with Markarian’s chain again to gather better data than yesterday’s. Captured 15 x 300s tonight. I’ll do another final set tomorrow.

At 23:45 I moved on to M4 a globular cluster in Scorpius. I will continue with this again tomorrow night as I landed up with about 1.5 hours of usable data.

M4 Globular Cluster – stacked only

At around 2am I moved to M55 as M4 had got fairly low in the sky so I will come back to that tomorrow night. I did find there was too much time spent refocusing so I have now changed this to only as the temperature changes and at the start of a new image rather than every 30mins as well.

M55 Globular Cluster – Stacked only

I captured 3 hours on this lovely globular cluster.

Viewing report Travel to Tenerife Night 1 – Thursday 4th July 2024

Started imaging at 11pm

Focus position main scope 12,334

Camera temp -15℃

Ended imaging at 5:30am

Beautiful night slightly windy 0.9’ seeing at first but then changed dramatically later to around 2.2’

Markarian’s Chain suffered from many satellite trails, more so early on.

View from the iPad

12 x 300s so 1 hour of Markarian’s chain

By the time I started to image M39 the wind had started to pick up and I found even guiding at 60s was causing star trails.

M39 single 5 mins sub

So about 3am I started taking darks and then by 4:15am the seeing which was really the problem had settled down from 2.2 arc secs to 0.9! I went back and took 30 x 60s subs for M55 and then another 30 x 60s for M39 before heading off to bed.

M55 single 5 min sub

This is the final stacked and processed image

M55 – 33 x 5 min subs