CEDIC team goes La Palma II - Introduction
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La Palma is a wonderful place for astrophotography: More
than 200 clear nights per year at an altitude of 800m and more
than 300 clear nights per year at the top of Roque de los
Muchachos, no light pollution, comfortable night temperatures
and only 4hours flight distance from Central Europe. With a
latitude of 28 degree, all southern objects culminate more than
20 degree higher than in Central Europe. |
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In the past, the infrastructure for high-end amateur
astrophotography was underdeveloped, and astrophotographers were
forced to bring their own equipment to the island of La Palma to
be able to create astro images with high quality. It was always
our dream to do astrophotography directly at a finca at La Palma
with high-quality equipment without the necessity to book excess
baggage.
In the new moon phase in July 2017 the CEDIC team had been
already observing at ATHOS Centro Astronómico, a finca in
La Palma, which offers besides an excellent sky and first-class
equipment also an outstanding service (both in
astrophotography and in accommodation). Since our first trip in July was
suffering from Calima (a hot, sand laden
wind that blows in from the Northern Sahara), the CEDIC team (www.cedic.at),
consisting of Christoph Kaltseis, Bernhard Hubl and Markus Blauensteiner followed the friendly invitation of Kai von Schauroth
for the second time to visit Athos. The second trip was
undertaken in the new moon phase in November 2017 to capture the
objects of the winter sky at comfortable ambient temperatures. |
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We could use the following equipment during our one-week
stay in Nov:
- ATHOS Observatory including AP175ED (7"), TEC 110FL (4") and
Moravian G4-16000 on 10Micron GM3000 HPS
- Baader APO 95/560, Nikon D810A and Nikon D850 on 10Micron GM
1000 HPS
- Pentax SDP 125 and Nikon D810A on Skywatcher EQ6-R
- Skywatcher StarAdventurer, AstroTrac and iOptron mounts
including a number of DSLRs with different telephoto lenses and
wide-angle lenses
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During
a time span of one week up to eight cameras were running in each
night. Planning and coordinating this huge number of different setups
within our team was a true challenge, which we could only master by
using the planning tool of CCD-Guide (www.ccdguide.com).
During the day and in the evening the sky was often cloudy, but in
the night the sky cleared almost always up and therefore, we could gather
raw data for more
than 40 images within our one-week stay. We grouped our results in 4 different parts:
- Part #1: Autumn Sky
- Part #2: Dust in Taurus
- Part #3: Orion's Nebulae
- Part #4: Nebulae in Monoceros
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