Through one of its small and rather dirty window we had a restricted view of the observatory’s dark interior. Inside I could see a large refractor which was sitting on a huge equatorial mount. The mount appeared to be a very solid piece of engineering. Other items inside the observatory hinted at recent use. There were no signs of neglect and the interior was very tidy.  There were pictures on the walls, a slide projector for presentations.  I was able to take a photo through the window but it was near impossible to get a decent picture. My best shot is below. Written on a small slip of paper attached to the inside of the window pane was fixed a name and contact telephone number – presumably access could be arranged but we were already on the last day of our stay. I noted the contact details on the back of a shopping receipt which I subsequently lost (darn!).       

A plaque mounted on the wall next to the entrance identified the observatory as “Museo Astronomico Henry Tiarks”. 

So who was Henry Tiarks?  On returning to our hotel I paid my 1 Euro for 20 minutes of Internet Access. A Google search for “observatory marbella” returned nothing immediately useful (perhaps if I had some Spanish I could pick some better search terms). A search for “Henry Tiarks” however was much more fruitful.   This is just a small taste of what I discovered (Source: J. Brit. Astron. Assoc., 106, 4, 1996, Article by R. Elizabeth Griffin):      

Henry Tiarks was born in 1900 into one of the City of London’s merchant banking dynasties. His grandfather (after whom he was named) became a partner of Schroders and his father, Frank, was a director of the Bank of England from 1912. He had been introduced to the Astronomer Royal by his grandmother, and having seen Halley’s Comet as an 11-year old boy he was determined to see it on its next return, and did so in 1986. In retirement Henry lived in Marbella where he enjoyed his love of astronomy. He was the longest living member of the Royal Astronomical Society, having been admitted in 1916. He became acquainted with Edwin P. Hubble, and was invited as a personal guest to spend a night with him at the Mount Wilson 100-inch telescope. An obituary published by the BAA states that had telescopes mounted on both south and north balconies, while his 8-inch Cooke refractor in the garden was housed in a replica of the Palomar 200-inch dome. Henry died in July 1995.      

Is this the very same telescope and dome in Parque de la Constitucion? Apart from the dome being green (which must turn the observatory into an oven in the sumnmer sun) the shutter mounting shows a resemblance to the Mt Palomar dome.  I am no expert on old refractors but the mount is identical to other examples of telescope made by Cooke such as the 5″ Cooke refractor owned by the Hampsire Astronomical Group and 10″ Cooke refractor at the Mills Observatory in Dundee, Scotland.  I can find no information on the Internet to indicate whether the telescope and observatory was relocated to its current location – or perhaps the Park was once part of Henry’s garden.  If you should holiday in Marbella the observatory is worth a visit especially if you can arrange for someone to open it. The park entrance is located on Ave de Espana and is just five minutes walk from the promenade.  The sky above Marbella suffers badly from light pollution; with a three quarter moon I could make out just one solitary star. This is not a great location for an observatory but even a daytime visit just to see the Cooke telescope would be worthwhile.      

A view of the park and the observatory can be found on Google maps (the observatory is highlighted by the green arrow).       

Although the SD66 has a short focal length (low magnification), the combination of the SD66 and small CCD on the ToUCam allowed only half of the moon to be seen.  To capture a complete image:   

•  Four AVI videos were capured and processed separately – each video giving a sufficient number of  frames to obtain a decent image of one quater of the visible moon. 
• Individual frames in each video were stacked using Registax to create four bitmap images. 
• The four images were then merged into a single image using  ‘imerge’, an excellent package developed by John Grove.

Here is the resulting image: 

Waxing Gibbous Moon – click to enlarge

 The Moon ‘waxes’ when the amount of illuminated surface (as seen from Earth) is increases.   The lunar phases progress as follows   

• new moon
• (waxing) crescent moon
• first-quarter moon
• (waxing) gibbous moon (a gibbous moon shows more than 50%)
• full moon

Then: 

• (waning) gibbous moon
• third-quarter (or last quarter) moon,
• (waning) crescent moon and
• new moon. 

Using my finder scope Kevin placed me almost in the centre of the Leo triplet at his first attempt and I was able to start acquiring images relatively quickly (although on this occasion the accuracy of my autoguiding left something to be desired).  

Kevin brought along his Meade LXD55 and DSI II and set up alongside my telescope pier. After sorting out his alignment Kevin settled for NGC3628 but his first attempt was unfortunately banjaxed by me when I forgot to switch off my head torch and when I looked around I let it illuminate his mirror.  Oops… sorry!   My garden has many steps and unexpected drops and stumbling around in the the dark Kevin managed to find most of them.   We packed up at just before 1 am with Kevin still in one piece.   Next time I’ll get him to sign a disclaimer. 

Kevin: Yes it was interesting to watch another astro-imager with a little more experience and somewhat ‘sexier’ kit work through the process of image acquisition. I’m heartened to see that it still takes Peter over an hour to set up and be ready to image, as I thought it was just me :). I guess each piece of equipment has its own settings to get just right, no matter what you own. I drooled over both Peter’s Takahashi and the 8Mpixel QSI camera, which (thanks to Peltier cooling) was imaging at some 30 degrees cooler than I was. Peter demonstrated Astroart for imaging and I showed off the Meade Autostar Suite software plus my Hartman & Bahtinov focussing masks.

That night I struggled for some time trying to correct my polar alignment, before spotting that my counterweights had come loose during transit, meaning my equatorial alignment was tilting in whatever direction the counterweights were pointing! Once fixed, I corrected my alignment using the drift method (the first time that’s EVER worked for me), re-aligned, focussed and synch’ed on Denebola before slewing over to NGC3628 to begin imaging.

The results of our work are shown below.   Peter: My thanks to Kevin for a great evening.  Kevin: Ditto!

NGC3628 by kevin Pretorius - click to enlarge

  The above image was taken using a Meade 8″ S/N on an LXD55 mount and DSI II camera. 

 Exposure details: 60 images at 15s

Leo Triplet by Peter campbell-Burns – click to enlarge

 The above image taken using a Takahashi FSQ106ED and QSI 583 WSG.  

Exposure: 8 * 120 R, G and B, 16 * 120 * L

Lookup M31 on SEDS

Andromeda Galaxy (M31) – Click to Enlarge

Lookup M101 on SEDS

The Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) - click to enlarge

 In addition to M101 and NGC 5474, there are another 7 galaxies visble in this image:

M101 Annotated Image - click to enlarge

 The image was taken with a QSI 583 WSG through a Takahashi FSQ106 ED.

The total exposure time is 48 minutes (as 24 120 second subframes):

• 720 seconds luminance exposure (IR)
• 720 seconds exposures in R
• 720 seconds exposures in G
• 720 seconds exposures in B

Image processed by John Moore

North America Nebula (NGC 7000) - click top enlarge

Imaged using an EQ6 Pro mounted Takahashi FSQ-106ED and QSI 583 CCD (autoguided by a Starlight Xpress Lodestar).   The image comprises 11 frames x 240 seconds Luminosity (Hydrogen Alpha) with 4 frames x 240 seconds in Red, Green and Blue.  The image was processed using Astroart 4.0

Cygnus Region – click to enlarge

 The second image below is better framed and almost centres on NGC 7000.   Visible in this image image are the stars Deneb, 56Cyg, 57Cyg, 59Cyg, 60Cyg, 63Cyg – the field of view also contains IC 5068, NGC 6997 and NGC 7039 but these are not resolved.  This image was captured using an Starlight Xpress MX7c with a 35mm lens mounted on an EQ1 mount.  The image comprises 15 frames of 35 seconds exposure processed and stacked using Astroart 4.0.

The North America and Pelican Nebulae – click to enlarge

Lookup M42 on SEDS

M42 – click to enlarge

Image taken with abn ED80 and Atik 16HR.  10 exposures of 60sec stacked using Astroart 4.0

Lookup M81 on SEDS

M81 – click to enlarge

Imaged using a Takahashi FSQ-106ED and  Atik 16HR.   40 minutes exposure (10 x 4min subframes)

Lookup the Veil Nebula on SEDS

Veil Nevula - click to enlarge

This image was taken with an Orion ED80 mounted on a Losmandy GM8 and an Atik 16HR.  34 exposures of 120sec were stacled using Astroart 4.0.  The image was further processed by  John Moore.