Österlen Observatory

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This is the official website of the Österlen Observatory, located near the quaint coastal village of Kivik in the peaceful province of Skåne in southern Sweden. The Österlen Observatory is home to two prominent research-grade installations: the Swedish FLT (Fairly Large Telescope) and the MMLT (the Mellby Moderately Large Telescope): The FLT is a 14-inch Meade RCX-400 which saw first light on a beautiful summer’s day in July 2010, looking at the planet Venus presenting a quarter phase shimmering in the late-afternoon sunlight. The view was exceptionally good and faint markings could be seen in the planet’s upper atmosphere as well as what appeared to be a small indentation in the terminator. The MMLT is a 14-inch Meade ACF mounted on an Astelco NTM-500 direct-drive electromagnetic German equatorial mount of exceptional performance.

The following video was recorded with the FLT and the seeing conditions were not as good and no cloud detail could be discerned. The disk of Venus is 20 arc-seconds in diameter when this video was recorded and the planet was brighter than magnitude -4. We were unable to see nearby Saturn and Mars as they were not bright enough to cut through the daylight sky glare. A Meade 3x TeleXtender was used with an Astro Engineeering camera adaptor to record these images.

And here’s a still from the video.

The planet Venus 01 August 2010