Day and Night on La Palma – The highlights from my last La Palma holiday

21st June 2015 / Carsten / 3 Comments

On my last La Palma holiday I did lots of experiments with my X-T1 camera. This time I was especially looking into time-lapsing. The result is “Day and Night on La Palma” – a 5 minute video about this beautiful island. To me, La Palma is the perfect place for doing this kind of videos. In this short video I want to show the highlights of my last holiday. Lots of stars, clouds and sunsets… 🙂 In order to make this video I visited many different places of the island. Some of them were Roque de Los Muchachos, Mirador del Jable, Mirador del Time and Pico Birigoyo. The music title “Worlds” has been composed by Jacob Tyler. I found it on www.soundcloud.com. I hope you enjoy the video 🙂

For those who are interested in technical details:

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The Virgo cluster recorded from Böblingen / Germany

22nd May 2015 / Carsten / Leave a comment

Are we alone? Impossible. Whenever I point my telescope to the Virgo-Cluster this is the first thing which comes to my mind. Tonight I tuned in the Interstellar soundtrack on youtube 🙂 When the first frame came in I was getting a strange feeling which was somewhere between happiness, admiration, worriedness, abjection and fear and a cold shiver ran down my back.

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Imaging the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51)

10th May 2015 / Carsten / 2 Comments

Today, after a long long cycling tour the weather forecast made me smile 🙂 There was a good chance that most of the clouds will go away between 23:00 and 2:00. Since the moon is going to rise at 2:11am there is a short but sufficient window to do some CCD imaging. Since I only have free view to the south from home, the position of M51 is a quite good compromise. The seeing with my f/5 GSO Newton (F=1000mm) is around 2.7″ – so this is more or less average.

	Date	2015/05/10
	Location	Böblingen / Germany
	Object	Whirlpool Galaxy (M51)
	Camera	Atik383L+
	Guiding	yes, QHY5-II Mono via OAG
	Telescope	8
	Barlow lens	none
	Mount	EQ6Syntrek
	Cooling	-15°C
	Luminance	6x, 600s, bin: 1x1
	Red	5x, 150s, bin: 2x2
	Green	5x, 150s, bin: 2x2
	Blue	5x, 150s, bin: 2x2
	Dark	5x
	Flat	10x
	Total exposure	~1h40min.

Clear skies!

Last updated: June 17, 2022 at 14:20 pm

Visiting the Tacande Observatory on La Palma

24th April 2015 / Carsten / Leave a comment

Last night I visited the Tacande Observatory on La Palma (link) to do some observations and to exchange about some technical topics. It’s owner is Joan Genebriera who built this observatory back in 2005 – right beside his house 🙂 He worked at the KVA Telescope on La Palma for several years before he retired. His observatory is located close to El Paso at a height of about 765m.

The observatory holds three telescopes on one custom made mount:

Cassegrain Relay 400mm f/6.5 = 18′ x 12′ (arcminutes)
R120S 120mm f/6.6 = 1.28° x 0.96° (arcdegrees)
R80 80mm f/6.0 = 2.65° x 1.76° (arcdegrees)

Inside the Tacande Observatory - the telescopes, La Palma, Spain

Even though I was in Spain communicating in English was no problem. After I got an introduction to the equipment we decided to image the Sombrero galaxy since it was in a quite good position.

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Star-gazing at Casa Victoria on La Palma

22nd April 2015 / Carsten / Leave a comment

The second part of my La Palma holiday I spent at Casa Victoria (28°41’31.3″N 17°57’20.0″W). It is also a kind of cottage but a bit more modern than Casa La Chirlaca. However, compared to Casa La Chirlaca it has a little less canary atmosphere and the garden is not so nice in comparison. The house is a few hundred meters lower than Casa La Chirlaca and so it is a few degrees warmer. Especially when having breakfast outside in the morning this was very pleasant. Unfortunately Casa Victoria has no internet connection. The view on the sea is great and Polaris is visible from the garden. The owner only spoke Spanish but for just handing over the keys it was not a big problem.