Finally, I got the chance to do some social observing and some astrophotography away from home when I went to the Mangrove Mountain Pony Club on Saturday night.

It was my first session of astrophotography away from home since January, when I captured the Rosette Nebula at the Pony Club! Yes, it had been that long!

I captured some piggyback widefield images of the Milky Way, which are yet to be processed – but while packing up I also set the camera up to do some quick star trail shots, and the final stacked image is below.

Star Trails while packing up at the Mangrove Mountain Pony Club

The image above is a stack of 8 frames, captured with my Canon 20D on a fixed tripod, ISo400, 2.5 minute exposures. The fuzzy patch is the star clouds of the Milky Way.

I created an animated gif of all 8 single frames, which you can see below (click on the image to download the 700kb gif).

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