Astrophotography and Scientific Imaging
Alnitak offers remote access to the 0.43 m Dall-Kirkham telescope in the observatory at the southern edge of Sierra del Segura mountain range in Spain, at the elevation of 1,650 m.
Alnitak Remote Observatory
The 0.43 m corrected Dall-Kirkham telescope is installed in the observatory at the southern edge of Sierra de Segura mountain range in Spain, at the elevation of 1,650 m. The location is part of the Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas Natural Park which is the largest protected area in Spain and second largest in Europe, declared as biosphere reserve by UNESCO in 1983.
The telescope is dual-optimized for scientific imaging and deep sky astrophotography purposes and offers a full set of color, narrowband and Johnson/Bessel photometric filters. The 60-Megapixel back-illuminated CMOS sensor installed features very high quantum efficiency level peaking above 87%.
The overall design of the telescope is focused on providing a highly efficient platform for astronomical observations for a wide range of missions.
Average seeing at Sierra del Segura, with 21.5 SQM
More than 200 clear nights per year
Pricing and Reservation
The telescope is available without monthly subscription fees and is billed for imaging time only.
Alnitak charges for imaging hours only and the technical overhead time is not billed.
No fee
Without monthly subscription fee.
15 minutes
Minimum reservation time.
Volume Discounts
More imaging hours – lower cost.
Per-minute billing
You pay only for the actual imaging time used.
Frequently Asked Questions
In order to task Alnitak telescopes, you need to create an imaging plan in the Plans menu once you are logged into the system. We provide graphical user interface that allows you to create plan files easily by selecting your astronomical target by name or coordinates and specifying the number of images, filters and other options. Once the plan is created, you will need to reserve the observation time slot in the Telescope Reservation menu by clicking and dragging across the time slots and assign your imaging plan to a range of time slots. Once the reservation is processed successfully your images and log files will appear for downloading in the Data Files menu.
Once Alnitak telescope has finished executing your imaging plan, your images will be available for downloading via Alnitak web interface in the Data Files menu in the FITS format. You can also download your files in bulk via FTP connection to portal.alnitakobs.com (port 21) using your Alnitak account e-mail and password as login credentials.
Yes, we will provide fully calibrated FITS files with bias, dark and flat-frame calibration applied automatically by the system. Raw images will also be available in the RAW folder along with the calibrated images.
You can reserve any time up to 15 minutes in advance.
The total length of your reservation should cover your expected imaging time along with the additional technical overhead time required for slewing, auto-focusing, autoguider initialization and other tasks. The amount of overhead depends strongly on the chosen exposure duration and auto-focusing intervals, but generally for most long-exposure imaging tasks it is approximately 1.2 to 1.5 times the imaging time. For example, for a plan with a total of 100 minutes of expected imaging time, reserve a time slot of approximately 120-150 minutes. For very short exposures or plans with very low total number of frames the overhead time may increase dramatically.
If there is no reservation following your reserved time slot then your plan will continue to run until the roof is closed or another reservation is encountered on the same night. If there is a reservation that follows yours, then your plan will be aborted by the end of your reserved time slot.