Moon under 15%
Deep Field
Five hours on Vaciado, moonless nights only, galaxies and globulars.
- Length
- 5 hours
- Places
- 5
- Available
- 8 nights / month
- Price
- $165
Five hours, five people, one telescope. This is the session that uses the site for what it is: a Bortle 1 sky with a 610 mm mirror under it.
The target list is built the afternoon of the session against actual conditions rather than fixed in advance. On a night with steady seeing that means tight globulars pushed to high magnification; on a transparent but unsteady night it means low-surface-brightness galaxies where resolution matters less.
You will spend a long time on a small number of objects. Twenty minutes on Centaurus A is not excessive — the dust lane resolves into structure somewhere around minute eight, and most people miss it if they leave at minute three.
What it is pointed at
Altitudes below are computed for this observatory at local midnight on the reference night in the calendar. An object below about 30° is looking through too much atmosphere to be worth the time.
| Target | Catalogue | Mag | Altitude | Bearing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Omega CentauriThe largest globular in the sky. At 610 mm it resolves to the core and stops looking like a cluster at all. | NGC 5139 | 3.9 | 32° | 228° SW |
| Centaurus AThe dust lane takes about eight minutes at the eyepiece to resolve into structure. Most visitors leave before it does. | NGC 5128 | 6.8 | 31° | 233° SW |
| Tarantula NebulaInside the Large Magellanic Cloud, 160,000 light years away, and still a naked-eye knot. | NGC 2070 | 5.0 | 4° | 178° S |
| Sculptor GalaxyPasses almost overhead here, which is the whole argument for observing it from this latitude. | NGC 253 | 7.1 | 1° | 118° SE |