Moon under 30%
The Long Exposure
A full imaging night on Sombra, from calibration frames to a reduced result.
- Length
- 7 hours
- Places
- 3
- Available
- 12 nights / month
- Price
- $320
Seven hours that begin with darks and flats and end with a stacked, calibrated frame you take home. The point is the whole pipeline, not the pretty picture at the end of it.
Most people arrive able to operate a camera and unable to reduce what comes out of it. That is the gap this session exists to close. By about two in the morning you will have a stack, a set of calibration frames, and an understanding of why the stack looks wrong without them.
Three people maximum, because the reduction is done together on one screen and four is a crowd.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Sculptor GalaxyPasses almost overhead here, which is the whole argument for observing it from this latitude. | NGC 253 | 7.1 | 1° | 118° SE |