Friday 1 July 2011

Bye bye UK sky

I am currently enjoying the stunning delights of La Palma skies at a little observatory on the west of the island. The faintest stars I could see were 6.0 magnitude against the milky way and the atmospheric transparency is great. They also have a light pollution law here. Here is a picture I processed of the Teapot asterism in the direction of the centre of our Galaxy. I hired a 50mm f/1.4 lens, which I put on my modified Canon 1000D and stopped to f/1.6, and without any tracking whatsoever I got 16 pics of length 15 seconds atop a little gorilla-pod. Sagittarius is so high here it is easy to see the lagoon nebula (top) without binoculars, among many other objects: omega centauri, the dust lanes across Ophiuchus are obvious and 'strange' constellations like Telescopium. You can't beat coming this far south for views of the milky way.

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