XIX Spanish Astronomy Conference

During September 17, 18 and 19, 2010 the XIX Spanish Astronomy Conference took place in the Medicine Faculty of the Complutense University in Madrid. This is one of the most interesting Spanish meetings for amateur astronomers.

La Azotea decided that it could be a very nice opportunity to meet other colleages and, what it is more important, to know which projects and activities are they doing. This can help us decide which other observation projects we will do in the future.

In September 17 was the opening of the conference with an invited talk, a musical show and a organized dinner for the participants. However, we could not attend that day (we had to work!). We traveled all night in a bus to Madrid in order to be very early for the 18th (Saturday) sessions. It is also worth to note that it was the European Mobility Week and so, we carried our folding bikes and avoid all buses and subways in Madrid.

So, Saturday was the most intense day of the conference with 3 parallel sessions where many different works were presented. The majority of them were works from amateurs but there were also some presentations made by professional astronomers. The quality of the presentations was quite good, but we specially enjoyed the ones about the preparation of the next Mars missions, the dark sky works, the collaborations between amateur and professionals (in which the quite high level of many amateur astronomers were pointed out), the astrometry and photometry ones and the ones about constructing observation sites in urban environments.

In addition to the talks there were some other organized activities. In the evening some of the participants made a visit to the university observatory, some others went to an "astronomical walk" through the streets of Madrid and we... decided to go to sleep because we were very tired. There were some other activities organized for the coffe breaks as the presentation of some of the photographs presented to the astrophotography contest, the exposition of the Messier catalogue prepared by the La Safor Astronomical Association and the very impressive model of the Marineris Valley prepared by the Astroingeo University Astronomical Association.

Some of the sponsors had the oportuninty of showing their newest astronomical products. Probably the most impressive one was the 14'' Celestron HD Edge in a CGE-Pro mount.

The last day was a more relaxed one. There were some nice tutorial. The one that we liked most was the Astrocamp one, were they showed a real live connection to a remote telescope. There were some invited talks about the Internation Astronomy Year and the 25th aniversary of the AstronomíA journal. Finally, the results of the astrophotography contest were announced. We are quite happy because La Azotea won the first and second prizes in the planetary category with a Jupiter photo and a Moon mosaic (both of them have been previously published in this web site). Both of them have been made with the excelent QHY-5 from Lunático.

1st prize in the planetary category

2nd prize in the planetary category

Finally, we would like to thank the sponsors of the contest for the prizes (Valkanik, IMVO, Oryx, AstronomíA, Lunático) and to note that we think that to attend to this kind of meetings is quite interesting to share experiences about our hobby and to spend some nice time together.