Places · Ground station
Madrid Deep Space Complex
The European station of the Deep Space Network, and the one that carried the Apollo 11 signal for part of the mission.
- Where
- Robledo de Chavela, Spain
- Coordinates
- 40.43°N 4.25°W
- Since
- 1964
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- mdscc.nasa.gov
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 5 — suburban, Bortle 5–6, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 5.2–6.0. The Milky Way is invisible or nearly so. Clouds are lit from below. You can read a newspaper outside on a clear night.
Against that sky 82 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 85 in a 130mm, with 15 reachable by eye alone. The nearest sky of Bortle 2 or better lies about 134 km south of here.
The Sun drops far enough below the horizon here for full astronomical darkness on every night of the year — which is not true of anywhere much further from the equator.
The centre of the galaxy reaches 21° at its highest, which puts the brightest part of the Milky Way clear of the horizon murk without ever being overhead. Of the 110 Messier objects, 11 never set from here and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
The sky here is kindest to Cat's Eye Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and Sunflower Galaxy, each of which passes within a few degrees of overhead — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Little Dumbbell, Pinwheel Galaxy and Owl Nebula never set from this latitude, so they are available on any clear night of the year rather than for one season of it.
Read at 40.43°N 4.25°W. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Madrid Deep Space Complex?
Everything south of declination −50°. From 40.4°N that is a cap 40° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 12% of the whole celestial sphere. Nothing about the calendar or the aperture changes that — the cap is below the horizon at every hour of every night. Its mirror image, the same 12% around the north celestial pole, is circumpolar here and never goes down.
How many hours of true darkness does Madrid Deep Space Complex get?
From about 4 hours 46 minutes at the thin end of the year, near 21 June, up to 11 hours 26 minutes around 21 December. That counts only proper astronomical night, with the Sun eighteen degrees down; the merely-dark hours either side of it are longer. Unlike sites further from the equator, no part of the year here is written off entirely.
When is the Milky Way best from Madrid Deep Space Complex?
Around 17 June, when the galactic centre transits at local midnight, and usefully from about May to September — earlier each evening as the season goes on. 40.4°N is close enough to the equator that the sky reaches full astronomical darkness on every night of the year, so unlike sites further north there is no part of the season where the core is high and the sky refuses to cooperate.
How far is Madrid Deep Space Complex from the other sites on this map?
Pic du Midi Dark Sky Reserve is the nearest thing to it here — 459 km to the north-east. The nearest other ground station is ESOC — European Space Operations Centre, 1,450 km to the north-east. Distances are great-circle, so they are what a signal covers rather than what a road does.