Five instruments, drawn to scale

Vaciado

610 mm f/4.1 Newtonian · first light 2014

The largest instrument on site and the one most visitors come for. At 610 mm it gathers roughly 7,600 times the light of a dark-adapted eye, which is the difference between knowing Centaurus A has a dust lane and seeing it.

Good for

• Faint galaxies and galaxy groups
• Globular clusters resolved to the core
• Planetary nebulae with a narrowband filter

Not for

Anything wider than about half a degree. The field is small, so the Magellanic Clouds and the larger emission nebulae are better in Corvus.

Sombra

356 mm f/11 Ritchey-Chrétien · first light 2017

Sombra is the instrument that does the work nobody watches. Most nights it runs unattended on a target list, and most of its output is a stack of sub-frames that will not look like anything for another two weeks.

Good for

• Long-exposure deep-sky imaging
• Photometry of variable stars
• Small, high-surface-brightness targets

Not for

Casual visual use. The focal ratio is slow and the field is narrow enough that finding a target by eye is frustrating rather than rewarding.

Corvus

130 mm f/6.5 apochromatic refractor · first light 2012

The oldest instrument here and the one we would keep if we could keep only one. A three-degree field at 130 mm is the right tool for a sky where the Large Magellanic Cloud is naked-eye obvious and rewards magnification without cropping.

Good for

• Wide fields: the Magellanic Clouds, Eta Carinae, the Coalsack
• Double stars with clean colour separation
• First views for people who have never used a telescope

Not for

Faint galaxies. At 130 mm most of them are smudges, honestly.

Solano

90 mm hydrogen-alpha solar telescope · first light 2019

Double-stacking gets the bandwidth down to about half an angstrom, which is the difference between a flat orange disc and a surface with structure on it. Prominences change visibly over a two-hour session; on a good day you can watch one detach.

Good for

• Prominences at the solar limb
• Active regions and filaments on the disc
• Afternoon sessions when the sky is useless for anything else

Not for

Night. It is a solar telescope.

Camino

200 mm f/2.8 astrograph · first light 2021

Fast, wide and portable. Camino is the instrument that leaves the site — most often to the salt flat eleven kilometres west, where the horizon drops another two degrees and the Milky Way core rises out of genuinely nothing.

Good for

• Wide-field imaging of the southern Milky Way
• Comets
• Anywhere on the plateau you can drive to

Not for

Small targets. At 560 mm a typical galaxy occupies a few dozen pixels and there is nothing to be done about it.