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Castle of clouds -observatory

CASTLE OF CLOUDS

Welcome to my observatory! Here is where most of my images 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.
 

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The telescopes in the observatory operate fully automatically, with three computers controlling their functions and the building itself. These telescopes are 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 two telescopes: a 100mm apochromatic refractor and a 200mm Newtonian reflector belonging to a fellow astrophotographer Erik Pirtala.

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The observatory is also equipped with an all sky camera and a weather station. This system monitors weather in real time and is also used to detect meteors entering our planets athmosphere automatically.

Live image and weather data can be viewed
here.

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Skies here are very dark as the site is located in a Bortle scale 3 zone. Even faintest nebulas are within reach of the telescopes without light pollution gradients and remote control allows very long integration times with ease. The main goal is to create pretty pictures but some of the imaging time is used to make scientific contribution as well with photometric observations.

Please visit the gallery to see the latest images.

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