Telescope Rental

For the amateur astronomer residing in our lodges, we rent both visual and photographic equipment:

Visual telescopes :

We have a 50cm F/4 azimutal telescope, it's rented with a set of 3 Explore Scientific ultra wide field, 20, 14 and 9mm eyepiece, a Paracorr, and nebular filter. It has a Nexus digital setting circle system, with wifi interface.

We can also rent the telescopes which are used during the tours, but after the tours only.

45cm F/4.1 azimutal telescope

60cm F/3.3 azimutal telescope

70cm F/4.5 azimutal telescope

For those of you still using pre 1799 units, this is 17.5 inches, 24 inches and 28 inches. :)

The price is 60000 pesos per night for the 50cm telescope. 30000 for the half night for the 45cm, 40000 for the 60cm and 50000 pesos for the 60cm. They are rented on a first reserved first rented base.

In order to rent a telescope, which you will use alone, you need to have some experience of visual observing with a non goto telescope, i.e. how to aim the telescope, and have an idea of what to aim it at. So this is mainly for amateur astronomers with a correct experience of visual telescopes. Said otherwise, when you rent a car, it's better if you know how to drive and know where you want to go, if not, it's a lot better to take one of our sky tours.

We don't rent telescopes and equipment outside of our observatory.

Reservations should be made by email, at least a week before the night.

Photographic equipment :

Our experience has led us to change the way we were doing things. We don't rent observatory telescopes anymore. Experience has shown that getting good pictures from an unknown advanced setup (i.e. telescope, goto mount, guiding telescope, CCD camera, filter wheel, automatic focusing) was not a one night adventure. We therefore only rent small mounts adapted to wide field photography, up to 200mm telephoto lenses. We rent :

Star trackers (Polarie Vixen, iOptron star tracker or Skywatcher Star adventurer)

Small equatorial mounts (Skywatcher EQG5). These are equipped with a small platform able to support your DSLR camera.

Do not forget to bring your intervallometer.

The telescope rent is paid after you observe or just before. Normally the sky is clear here, but there are cases when it is cloudy or partially cloudy. We apply the following guidelines on telescope renting:

Sky is clear or clear for more than 80% of the night, renting is paid (even if you decided that after all you don't want to observe).
Sky is cloudy, no rent is paid.
Sky is on and off, we talk according to how much you could observe to agree on a fair rate.

Only for the clients of our lodge, we can loan a pier, with electricity, on which you can install your own mount. We also provide counterweights, so that you can come to Chile only with the head of your mount. The top part of the pier has a hole through which one can locate a screw holding the mount (there is a small hole through which insert and tighten the screw.

Please contact us for the current pricing, depending on what configuration you need, and the number of nights