Last night we visited the Tacande Observatory on La Palma to do some observations and to exchange about some technical topics. It's owner is Joan Genebriera who built this observatory back in 2005 - right beside his house 🙂 He worked at the KVA Telescope on La Palma for several years before he retired. His observatory is located close to El Paso at a height of about 765m.
Even though we were in Spain communicating in English was no problem. The telescopes can be used for visual observations as well as for CCD photography. We decided to take some photos of the sky. After we collected some frames of the Sombrero galaxy we decided to try some other objects with just shorter exposure time. For example we tried M3, M95 and the huge Omega Centauri cluster which is not visible from Germany at all. The best results can be found here.
The hours passed very quickly and after 2o'clock we decided to finish our observations since we still had to drive home. We copied everything to an USB stick so that we were able to process the raw data later.
Our conclusion: If you are once on La Palma and you are interested in taking photos of the night sky with a quite good telescope you should pass by at the Tacande Observatory.
