the "Pine" Observatory


site: Lussito (Acqui T.) ITALY
lat. : +44°39'
long. : 8°28' E
The building is just a little wooden house with an opening roof.
It was born in spring 2001 around a concrete pier and hold the instrument, all the accessories and an old computer for driving the telescope and the CCD cameras.


The main instrument is a Celestron C11 (SC diameter 280mm focal l. 2800mm) on a Losmandy G11 mount with the Gemini Astro Positining System.

The complete setup includes a JMI NGF-S electric focuser, a Meade 6.3 and an Optec 3.3 focal reducer and two Starlight Xpress CCD cameras: a MX916 for luminance frames and a MX5-C for colour images.

The guide is performed by the STAR2000 system for simultaneuos track and imaging with the same sensor.

 

The MX916 used with the 6.3 focal reducer and the MX5-C with the Optec 3.3 return a similar sampling of about 2.7" and a similar chip coverage of 17'x13'. This way I can combine the images in a pseudo-quadricromy (the luminance file by the MX916 and the colour files exstracted from the MX5-C).
Most of the CCD images in this site are realized with this technique.

My old telescope was a Meade LX200 8" f:6.3 that I used with an off axis guider and the Meade 201XT CCD autoguider.
All the film images of this site were realized by this instrument.


In this old image you can see the pier that I had to raise by 50cm for using in the observatory.
You can see a description of my concrete pier with some drawings and the images of the building.

This telescope is now in anothes site on the italian Alpes (Valtournenche, alt.1650mt) and is used just for visual observation.

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