Astrophotography by Bernhard Hubl

Chile is a wonderful place for astrophotography - more than 300 clear nights per year, no light pollution, and perfect access to all objects of the southern sky.

In the past, the infrastructure for remote observing in Chile was underdeveloped for amateur astronomers. The astrophotographers were forced to travel to this faraway place to be able to create astro images under the Chilean skies.

ChileScope (www.chilescope.com) is a new service which offers remote observing with high-quality equipment under the perfect Chilean sky. Telescopes with incredible apertures (one 1.0m telescope and two 0.5m telescopes) are available. No investments in expensive equipment are necessary to get access to these large aperture-telescopes.

Since, the CEDIC-Team has already a lot of experience using large telescopes, knowing the incredible potentials and also the challenges of big scopes, the team took the offer to work with ChileScope’s 1.0m telescope in 2018.

After having created a list of potential targets with CCD-Guide (www.ccdguide.com), avoiding fields with too bright stars, we created an image acquisition strategy, optimized for the AltAz mount of the 1.0m telescope.

The first two images were captured by the CEDIC-Team between April and June 2018.

Image processing was demanding, but we are very happy with the results.