Introduction

Tejas Observatory is a robotic, remotely controlled observatory located at New Mexico Skies and is a joint effort of Mark de Regt and Lloyd Bentsen (inspecting the observatory). Mark lives near Redmond, Washington. He began imaging in 2001 first with a 10” LX200 and in the summer of 2005 with a 12” RCX 400.  Lloyd lives in Houston, Texas and began imaging in 2003 with a 12” LX 200 and then moved to a Mewlon 300 in 2005. Mark joined Lloyd in creating the Tejas Observatory as they both sought darker skies. The pictures on this website are some of Lloyd’s images taken at New Mexico Skies.

About the Tejas Observatory

The Observatory is located at New Mexico Skies (NMSkies), a telescope/observatory farm developed and managed by Mike and Lynn Rice. Due to the excellent seeing conditions (away from light pollution), altitude (at 7300 feet) and the superb support of the Rice team, many of the finest astrophotographers in the U.S. have observatories at NMSkies.

The Tejas Observatory contains three telescopes with a 16” RCOS, an AP 130mm and a Takahashi Sky90. All three are mounted on a Paramount Me within a 10’ diameter ProDome. Imaging is accomplished through SBIG STL 11k or 10 XME cameras. A typical evening consists of getting TheSky planetary software, RCOS mount/telescope software, CCDSoft camera software, FocusMax or RoboFocus focusing software, and AutomaDome dome operating software all to work together under CCDAutoPilot, the executive program which manages an evening of imaging.

A typical evening may result in 5 to 6 hours of imaging or 250 to 350 megabits of data. Post processing of an evening’s imaging data is accomplished with various combinations of MaximDL, CCDSoft, CCDStack, Registar and PhotoShop CS, all imaging processing software programs.