THE CASTLE OF CLOUDS

Welcome to my observatory! Here is where most of my images of the cosmic landscapes are made. Nicknamed "Castle of Clouds" the observatory is located in Varkaus, Finland. Behind it is one of the observatories that belongs to amateur astronomical association Warkauden Kassiopeia. You can find more about them here.

The telescopes in the observatory operate automatically, with multiple computers controlling the functions and the building itself. This system is capable of running throughout the night without requiring human intervention, enabling the acquisition of vast amounts of exposure time with ease. Most of the deep sky photographs featured on this site have an exposure time ranging from 20 to 40 hours, and the longest projects may contain upwards of 60 hours of integration time. Currently, the observatory houses a 250/1175mm Newtonian reflector with a ASI2600MM Pro -camera dedicated for deep sky imaging. The entire assembly is mounted on an american made Losmandy G11 equatorial mount.

The second setup is purely for scientific observations, currently I'm using a 200/1200mm Newtonian with a QHY Minicam 8M and an iOptron HEM15 mount.

Skies here are very dark as the site is located firmly in a Bortle scale 3 zone, with frequent SQM readings on the better side of 21.40. Even faintest objects are within reach of the telescopes without the ever-growing problem of light pollution. Remote control allows very long integration times and frequent observations of photometric targets with ease.
The observatory is also equipped with two all sky cameras, Sky Quality Metering system and a weather station. These systems monitor the environment in real time. The older all sky camera is used to detect meteors entering our planets atmosphere automatically as it requires reasonable amounts of computing power to run line detection algorithms on it.

The newer camera is equipped with a much larger and more sensitive pixel array. It is more suitable for detection of faint phenomena such as rare types of Aurora Borealis or rocket launches and also to visually verify good observing conditions. Main purpose of these systems is to contribute to the amateur meteor detection community and scientific research projects. With multiple cameras across the country hosted by other astronomers it is possible to triangulate a path of a possible meteorites and perhaps one day hold a piece of the heavens myself.

The live image of these cameras can be found here.