We woke late, had the usual breakfast, checked out, drove the car very gingerly out of the underground car park – God these spots are so narrow and when you’re driving on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road, negotiating suicidal pedestrians is tricky. Still, with Google maps working seamlessly on the car display we quickly found out way to the main autoroute to Seville and hence South to Conil.

We stopped for coffee at what seemed like a quiet service station only to find half the population of Andalusia inside, chatting, gesticulating and generally having a great communal experience. In the middle of which Menna phoned to get our help finding Pero’s missing dog collar 😢.

Forty five minutes later back on the autoroute Menna called back to say that the missing collar with dog GPS had been found. It was 10m and 30 minutes away from where the app confidently told us it was. To add to the difficulty it would appear that telling the device to beep furiously for help had no effect whatsoever. Still, it gives us some idea of where Pero is when he’s off lead pursuing squirrels and muntjac.

We got to Conil around 1:30 and were met with smiles and a really cheerful demeanour by a lady who spoke no English but had no problems showing us how everything worked in the apartment. Which as it turns out is excellent, 2 separate bedrooms, bathroom, large sitting room and kitchen. There’s also a large private terrace on which I could set up the dwarf 3 telescope. 😊

We had a lovely walk along the beach with Frank and Marion under a setting sun before heading back to play with the telescope and watch the Bourne Identity on my Netflix account on the TV in the lounge. Not available in the UK any more it is in Spain as are the rest of the series – it’s win-win.

At 8:30 pm, though feeling ready for bed, we jumped into the car and drove 30km to a small town, also on the coast where a group of Frank and Marion’s friends were meeting for dinner at a relatively basic but highly regarded restaurant specialising in all aspects of cooking tuna.

An eclectic mix of German, Spanish, American and Italian nationalities their professions ranged from judge, professor of American studies through advisor to the German president, journalistic correspondent and media personalities. And Dorothy and me 😊. The food was excellent, the company delightful and all was well. We’d been forced to park a couple of km from the restaurant but that’s pretty much par for Spain in my experience. The journey home was fine though the small Peugeot 208 we’d hired has a great main bean but poor dipped headlights. Road markings are ok but not ideal so progress wasn’t rapid.

Still, back in the apartment by midnight. The dwarf 3 looked at me disconsolately. The night was clear, the terrace available so I trotted upstairs.

I kicked off with 72 exposures of 15s each of the Orion Nebula (the middle ‘star’ of Orion’s sword).

I bit the bullet and following the excellent video put the dwarf into EQ mode which allowed me to take longer exposures so I set it up for 300 exposures of 30s each checked that it was working correctly and went to bed.

The Dwarf 3 keeps the original raw data files so once home I’ll fire up Pixinsight, (both dwarf 3 and Pixinsight paid for from the ill gotten gains from my Bitcoin sales), work out how to use it and process the files again, merging the 72x15s exposures with the 300x30s exposures to hopefully get an excellent final image.

Exciting times 😊

Buenas noches