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.

This image was taken this morning at approx 4:45am local time on the 24th September 2008, with a mag -1 ISS pass flying by at an altitude of approx 43deg.

I put the camera direct on the EQ mount (plonked down and not aligned) and set it to track so that I wouldn’t get the usual short trailing stars with the longish exposures.

2 exposures of 60s each, ISO100, f/4.5 were the settings used on my Canon 350D and Sigma 17-70mm lens @ 17mm. The two exposures were combined with Lighten blending, and a very minor curves and levels adjustment.

I had the moon to set the auto-focus on (and then lock it to manual) which was handy, too.

licence:

Moon, Orion and the ISS

Thanks for looking.