Moon under 10%
Winter Residency
Five consecutive nights around new moon, one project, all five instruments.
- Length
- 5 nights
- Places
- 4
- Available
- 5 nights / month
- Price
- $2400
Five nights in June or July, scheduled to straddle new moon, with one project you define in advance and we help you scope down to something achievable in five nights.
Most proposals arrive twice as large as the time allows. Narrowing them is the first evening's work and the most valuable part of the week.
Four places. Winter nights here run to ten and a half hours of astronomical dark, which is the longest this latitude offers and the reason the residency is not run in December.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Small Magellanic CloudSits beside 47 Tucanae, which is the better object of the two and gets more eyepiece time. | SMC | 2.7 | 20° | 162° S |
| Running Chicken NebulaFaint visually, excellent in narrowband, which makes it a Long Exposure target rather than a Deep Field one. | IC 2944 | 4.5 | 19° | 208° 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 |