Capturing the colours within the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex has been on my list for a few years now. It was included in the first 'deepscape' image I had seen and I thought it was unbelievable, that there was something so colourful in the night sky and that they had captured it so perfectly with a camera and a lens blew my mind. The shapes of the clouds and the way they seem to mix together is fascinating and I've spent hours going through different images.
Although I was proud with my initial attempt (Rho Ophiuchi Rising), I really wanted to try and improve on it, especially the yellows and the reds that I struggled to capture in the first attempt. That meant travelling to a place where Rho Ophiuchi would be higher above the horizon for longer, and that was the reason for my trip to Tenerife.
The Plan:
Again, using the trusty 'PlanIt Pro' app I had a look at places I knew I could hike to and from pretty easily from the hotel Parador de las Canadas in Teide National Park. I had been there before and knew the path round the Roques de Garcia would be easy, and most importantly would have a view of Guajara, a cool looking mountain that at certain times of the year has the milky way rising behind it, and therefore Rho Ophiuchi.
Using the app I calculated a focal length of 112mm (same as the Orion deepscape - 70mm x 1.6 for my crop sensor DSLR) and the screenshots of my plan are below:
The Shot:
I started setting up and it wasn't long before I was aligning the tracker with Polaris for the long exposures. As this was a deepscape and I was using a longer lens, polar alignment had to be pretty spot on to allow for pinpoint stars, so I took my time. However every time I took a test shot the stars continued to trail. That was fine, it can sometimes take a while as it's very fiddly so I stuck with it... Although after an hour or so I was now questioning everything, I couldn't get the tracker to work no matter what I tried. You've obviously got the wrong star! I told myself, so I started again, convinced that the darker sky had made it more difficult to find Polaris.
This carried on for another hour and by now Rho was already way higher than the mountain so I started to change lens just so I could get some wide-angle shots, thinking at least these won't need such perfect polar alignment. As I started to change lens, I heard some footsteps and look up to see a headtorch bobbing towards me along the path quite quickly. Before I could decide whether I was hallucinating from having not slept in the last 24 hours, I was happy to see it was just a runner getting a very early start on a mountain run, and he didn't even seem to notice me standing there like a rabbit caught in his torch beam.
Pretending the runner hadn't just scared the life out of me, I started taking wide-angle shots and I was still having the same problem. About to give up I just started turning every switch and pressing every button on the tracker out of frustration and there it was... The little switch on the side of the tracker that changes between Northern hemisphere or Southern Hemisphere had been nudged in my bag at some point and wasn't fully clicked into 'N'. By now, with it being 5am and the sky too bright to get any decent shots I decided this wasn't my night and I packed up.
Although I was really disappointed with how this first night of the trip went and I was definitely left wondering what I was doing here, it was a good lesson, plus I still came back with a nice image of the rising moon with some cool 'earthshine' and some ok milky way shots. I also managed to salvage a cool 'starless' Dark Horse nebula shot. But creating the Rho Ophiuchi deepscape I had imagined was going to take a bit more effort...
Round 2 with Rho a couple of nights later went a lot better. Following my night shooting Orion I was feeling a bit more confident, knowing that although it was a stupid mistake I definitely knew how to polar align still! I set up and nailed the alignment quickly, getting the stars pinpoint and in focus with the first test shots. I set the remote timer and stepped back to let it do its thing, checking focus every now and then and watching the New York Rangers play on my phone under the stars to pass the time. With nearly an hour and a half worth of exposures for the sky I turned the tracker off and took one 10 minute exposure for the mountain. I then decided to try a quick milky way panorama as it was probably going to be my last clear night of the trip and I had never given it a go before.
Looking back, I wish I had just kept shooting the deepscape as I'm sure another hour or so would have allowed me to bring even more detail out of clouds, but I'm really pleased with the result especially with how demotivating the first night was.
Result
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