25 | August | 2014 | WATCH THIS SPACE(MAN)

Earlier this year we went to the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, which is recognised as the best astronomy site in Europe, where more than twelve major observatories have been built at an altitude of 2,396 meters on Roque de los Muchachos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_de_los_Muchachos_Observatory. One of the engineers responsible for building and maintaining some of these observatories was Joan Genebriera, who subsequently went on to build his own private observatory on the island, which I reviewed in an earlier post https://watchthisspaceman.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/la-palma-nice-one-joan/. Our trip was in order to undertake a week-long astronomy course with Joan and as part of this, develop (no pun intended) and fast track our knowledge of astrophotography.

Joan’s basic telescope and imaging set-up is, as you would expect, spectacular, with equally outstanding tracking:

Catadioptric Cassegrain-Relay 400mm telescope f5.6 (Larrose)
APO 120mm refractor f6.5 (Vixen)
Camera SBIG ST8300M
Camera SBIG CCD ST8XE
Camera Starlight Xpress CCD MX716 for use with spectrograph
Camera Canon 350 D DSLR

Of course this is just a list of equipment – it is what you do with it that matters and Joan’s expertise more than matched the quality of the equipment. Over a number if evenings we undertook a series of photographic exercises using the 400mm Cassegrain-Relay telescope and the SBIG ST8XE CCD camera with RGB filters. At the same time we rigged a Canon 350D camera on the refractor telescope to produce a contrasting, wide-field photograph to compare with the higher powered SBIG configuration. We brought some of the unprocessed data / images back from La Palma but have unfortunately been unable to process the SBIG ones yet as they as FITS format, for which I have not yet found suitable software (more on this another time). However, the Canon 350 D photographs are of equal but different beauty, which through the wide-field format show larger areas of sky, sometimes revealing vast groups of galaxies – amazing!