Saturn

After several bad weather days, and what it is much worse, loads and loads of work (congresses, end of the academic year...) the Friday evening look promising to go out and enjoy the sky. Both Antonio and myself wanted to go for a visual observation session in Sierra Nevada for a long time. La Azotea is a great place to learn astrophotography, but for visual observations it has lots of drawbacks.

The evening was quite complicated because I had to go to Cullar Vega to finish the preparations for the photography exposition Cosmos: Vistas desde la Nave Tierra of the S.A.G.. It took more time that we initially planned and we finished it  at 8PM. After that I went to Armilla where we loaded Antonio's Pequeñín in the van. Around 10PM we went to Granada to pick up more gadgets, supplies and, of course, some additional winter clothes. Finally, we began our trip to Sierra Nevada around 11PM.

The night of May 18 to May 19 was a fantastic occasion to go up to La Azotea and continue with our astrophotography learning sessions.

In fact, we were almost using for the first time our new "observatory wardrobe" where we are storing the heaviest items of our equipment (counterweights and tripods) and from which we directly have a power point and an Internet cable, which is quite useful to watch weather predictions from  Meteosat, to watch a film during the photo series or even to inform in real time about what we are doing there.

After waiting for may days for the good weather to come back to make some observation sessions, and what it is more important, begin taking astrophotographies, the evening  of February 14 looked quite promising. We thought that it would be a nice day to make our observing session in the Carretera de la Cabra, but last minute clouds made us change our opinion, so we decided to go to the Dornajo terrace in Sierra Nevada.

Once the van was fully loaded, we took the Sierra Nevada road and in the Centro de Interpretación exit we took the secondary road that goes near the terrace. Big error. The forbidden traffic signal, that we interpreted as "it is not recommended to use this road", was really more important than we initially thought. Half a kilometer up the road, the black asphalt turned into a quite good ice skating rink. The van could not go over the ice for more than five meters when it began to turn, getting crossed in the middle of the road and slipping back. At that point Antonio turned his head to say something to Zerjillo (the co-pilot) when he notices that he is already outside the van watching the show.