Well after 6+ months of planning and organising, it’s now finally time for IISAC2008 to begin. It starts tomorrow, Thursday, for 3 great nights with friends and hopefully 3 great nights of astronomy and astrophotography. Unfortunately the weather predictions are looking pretty ominous – it rained all day today  and although it’s likely to clear for some of the day tomorrow, there are predictions for showers and thunderstorms on at least 2 of the 3 days.  I’m just hoping it’ll clear after the storm so we can get at least 1 clear night in.

The trailer is packed, the car is packed and I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything. Unfortunately Kate and the kids won’t be joining me this year, i’ll be on my own. I’ll certainly miss them but I do understand how it is hard work for Kate there, with 3 young kids, trying to keep them entertained. Due to my need to keep the camp running smoothly, I don’t get much spare time to spend with my family so it makes it more difficult for Kate.

Hopefully I can bring home some great stories and great photos. See you in 4 days!

Here’s hoping for clear skies!

I’ve added a few new images to my Gallery in the last few days. The first set is of the equipment I use for my astrophotography – both planetary imaging and widefield DSO imaging.

12" newt on EQ6

The photo above shows my 12″ Newt on top of the EQ6, and was taken in early July 2008 at a planetary imaging camp with Anthony Wesley, at Nambucca Heads on the mid-north coast of NSW. It’s the setup I use for planetary imaging. Unfortunately during that week the seeing wasn’t good enough to obtain any really good images, but it was clear sky all week and was still a fantastic week of astronomy.

Deep Space Imaging Setup

The photo above shows my widefield DSO imaging setup on the EQ6, taken from my backyard. It includes the ED80 as the main imaging scope (the black one), with the Canon 350D attached, and the 80mm f/5 refractor (the white one) as the guide scope – with the DMK21AU04 (small blue camera) acting as the guide camera. The guide scope and guide camera work together in combination with software on the laptop to keep the mount tracking accurately by nudging in the appropriate direction when the star starts drifting.

There are a few other photos of my setup there, but I still need to add a few more and properly categorise them.

I’ve also added some new family photos to the Gallery, taken last weekend at Nords Wharf, north of the Central Coast on the way to Newcastle, on the edge of Lake Macquarie. The family and I went there for a picnic lunch, to a nice park/playground where the kids could play. It was a nice couple of hours. We also went to the beach at Catherine Hill Bay afterwards – it’s a lovely spot and was really busy on the hot Sunday.

Mike, Kate, Jacob, Eliza and Abbey

The photo was taken using a timed exposure, with the 350D on a tripod.

Thanks for looking.

Hi all

It’d been almost 6 months since doing any prime focus astrophotography through the ED80, and I was keen to shake off the cobwebs before IISAC2008. It was also my last chance to make sure all my equipment worked before packing it all away for travelling – I’d recently purchased a Belkin USB-Serial adapter, since my serial port had stopped responding on the laptop meaning I couldn’t use ImagesPlus to control the 350D long exposures, and this was the first chance to test that the adapter worked in the field.

I’m happy to report that everything worked as planned. No technical glitches, no equipment failures. It was a beautiful, clear night on Saturday night/Sunday morning and I used the opportunity to capture some data of the Great Orion Nebula (M42) as it rose in the East.

The image is made up of about 90 minutes worth of data at 10 minute subs, ISO400 with the Canon 350D and ED80 with WO 0.8x reducer/flattener. Guiding of the EQ6 was performed using PHD software with a DMK21AU04 and an 80mm f/5 refractor. ICNR was used for dark frames. 15x 15s and 15x 90s subs were used for the core area.

The Great Orion Nebula and Running Man

ImagesPlus was used for calibration, aligning, stacking and DDP. Photoshop CS2 was used for final processing. 

I’m quite happy with the final result – but I was very out of practise with processing deep-space images. I’m sure there’s more that could be done with the data, but it’s not a bad way to ease back into it.

Given clear skies at IISAC2008 (here’s hoping!), I’m happy that the equipment is ready!

Hi all

Over 4 years ago when IceInSpace was first created, it was originally my little home on the internet – a place to upload my images and share and write about my experiences in astronomy. It soon grew into a community site for amateur astronomers in Australia and across the world. I still kept my personal image gallery on IceInSpace but it always bothered me that it wasn’t really the right place for it anymore. 

Earlier this year, I decided it was finally time to completely separate my personal work from IceInSpace and create a new site specifically dedicated to my thoughts and my images – and here it is, mikesalway.com.au.

It’s been a long time coming – I started it back in April 2008 but have only found time to work on it in shorts bursts, before being dragged off to do more work on IceInSpace, or just being able to find the time outside of real work and family life.

I chose to use WordPress as the main site framework and Coppermine as the Gallery system. They have a reasonable level of integration for what I need it for, and sticking with Coppermine meant I didn’t need to upload all of my old images into a new gallery system. I went with WordPress as it’s easy to add new content to after the initial setup phase.

So what am I going to use this site for? At this stage i’m not really sure how it’s going to evolve. Without a doubt, as a minimum all of my new images, articles and reviews will be uploaded here. Beyond that – who knows. I’ll be feeding my blog with my thoughts about a wide range of topics, not just astronomy, so hopefully there’ll be always something interesting enough for you to bookmark mikesalway.com.au and to check back regularly. If you want to keep up-to-date automatically, you can subscribe to the RSS feed which will display any new posts in your feed reader.

I’d started writing posts many months ago while development of the site was ongoing, so you can see previous posts by using the archives links on the right. The articles and reviews I’ve written can be found in the articles and reviews pages, and you can find out more about me at the About page. All of my images can be found in the image gallery, though I still need to make a few minor changes and enhancements to the gallery section. Just as a heads-up, when you click on the image thumbnail, the pop-up image has a bunch of icons across the top to see the larger version, comment on or rate the image or to see additional information.

Like any blog, you can search for content, make comments to the articles or posts, and you can also make comments about any images in the Gallery section. If you know of any great astronomy or photography-related blogs or homepages, please contact me and I can add them to the list on the right-side of the page.

I want to improve this site and am happy to take on-board your feedback and suggestions – things you like, things you don’t like, things you’d like to see or site-related issues/problems. Contact me with your ideas! There are a few minor issues rendering the site in Internet Explorer, so please have patience while I get time to fix them. I’d recommend using Firefox as a browser, or even giving Google Chrome a try (although it’s still beta, my thoughts here).

I’d love to hear from you about anything – questions, comments or even just to say hi. Please use Contact page to send me an email.

If you like what you see here, I’d be grateful if you could add a link to MikeSalway.com.au to your sites, blogs and galleries to help people find my new personal site.

Thanks for reading!

Hi all

We had a fairly nice pass this morning, reaching about 57deg altitude. I set my 12″ newt up on the EQ mount to start with, and I used Betelguese which was nice and high so I could get focus and set exposure and align the finderscope. 

I then shifted the OTA to the dobsonian base and waited for the ISS to appear. I also had the 350D set up on the tripod to capture the wide field view. As soon as I saw it behind the trees, I started the shutter on the 350D and pressed record in IC Capture to start capturing through the scope.

I tracked manually using the finderscope to try and keep the ISS in the field of view.

12″ newt, 2x barlow, DMK21AU04, 60fps, 1/1667s shutter, 125 gain.

I’m fairly happy with the result, it’s all practise for the time when everything comes together. I like the shadow across the radiators – a view I haven’t captured before.

International Space Station

Here’s a 12-frame animation of the best frames in the pass.

licence:

ISS Animation

And the wide-field image, with the bright moon out of frame on the left.

ISS on the morning 17/10/2008

UPDATE: This image was featured on SpaceWeather October 21, as well as the French Astronomy Cameras Blog (how good is your French? :))

Thanks for looking.

Over the October long weekend, my family and I visited my Mum and Dad on their property up at Bellingen. They’ve called their 50 acres Allannie Ridge, a play on words combining both of their first names.

Bellingen is about 40 minutes South West of Coffs Harbour, and my parents property is down one of the valleys stretching out from Bellingen. 

My Dad built their house, the shed, everything. He’s an amazing tradesman – I wish I had even a quarter of his DIY skills! The images below were taken on our visit there – the first one is a 5-frame panorama and the second is a night HDR shot with star trails. 

Allannie Ridge

Allannie Ridge at Night

Thanks for looking.

This is another image taken during the Saturday night site reconnaissance for IISAC2008 on the 27th September 2008.

It’s 11 x 6 min exposures, ISO800 with the Canon 350D + Sigma 17-70mm @ 17mm. Piggybacked on the EQ6/ED80 combo, guided with a DMK21AU04. Dark subtracted, no flats.

Conditions were nice and dark with good transparency, but it was very windy with horrible seeing, causing guiding to have a few problems. Luckily with the short focal length it didn’t ruin any frames.

Unfortunately as the Milky Way set, a tree started creeping into frame on the bottom right corner, causing the very dark patch seen in the image. 

The Milky Way at Lostock

Thanks for looking and let’s hope for similar clear, dark skies at IISAC2008!

Hi again.

My family and I went for a trip up to Lostock on Saturday, 27th September 2008, for some site reconnaissance a month out from IISAC2008. 

The sky was lovely and dark as I remembered, however there was a strong stiff wind blowing and the seeing was terrible, but it didn’t stop me doing some widefield/piggyback shots.

Here’s one of the images from the night – a startrail shot looking south over the bottom farmhouse. My widefield imaging setup is in the foreground and the camera is on a tripod about 2 metres back.

I’m happy with how it turned out but it’s not exactly as I’d hoped in my minds eye. Need a wider angle lens to be able to fit more foreground interest while still getting enough sky. The SMC and LMC were very prominent in the individual frames but of course have been smeared beyond recognition in this combined image

The image is a combination of 46x 6 min exposures (4.6 hours) at ISO200, with a Canon 350D and Sigma 17-70mm lens @ 17mm. Dark subtracted and processed using startrails.de followed by Photoshop.

Southern Star Trails at Lostock

I’ll try for something similar, but hopefully with a better result, at IISAC2008!

This shot of Jupiter in the Milky Way was taken on the 20th September at the Mangrove Mountain Pony Club during one of our new moon meets.

I didn’t get there until 8pm and it’d been so long since I’d done any widefield photography, I didn’t capture my first real photon until 9:30pm or so. I also remembered that my serial port on my laptop is broken (stopped working at Nambucca in early July) and so I can’t control the camera (long exposures) through ImagesPlus anymore – so I had to use the timer remote for the exposure control and ImagesPlus just downloaded the images after each exposure.

Approx 12 exposures @ 5 minutes each, ISO800, using the Canon 350D + Sigma 17-70mm lens. 5 darks were used in the calibration (no flats). It was a very warm night after a very warm day.

Jupiter is the bright ’star’ at the top centre of the image.

Jupiter in the Milky Way

Thanks for looking.

This image of the 4 inner rocky planets (Venus, Mercury, Mars and Earth) was captured on Saturday night, 20th September, at Long Jetty on the Central Coast of NSW.

Venus, Mercury and Mars made a nice conjunction with the star Spica, forming a lovely triangle in the twilight sky. My daughter Eliza was the model on the jetty.

It was a lovely warm day but very windy. The photo was taken with my Canon 350D and Sigma 17-70mm lens, f/7.1, ISO100, 1.6s exposure.

Processing including selective enhancement of the planets, and saturation boost.

Venus, Mercury, Mars and Spica Conjunction

I was fortunate enough to have this image selected to appear on NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day (APOD) site on 30th September 2008, and I’ve received some great feedback. Eliza was embarrassed at first, but then thrilled to have the photo of her seen by hundreds of thousands of people across the world

Thanks for looking.