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).

Star Trails Animation. Click to play

Since January, it had been a mix of bad weather, low motivation, other priorities or things to do. But on Saturday morning, the sky was clear, we had nothing else on and I decided it was time to get back to the Pony Club and catch up with some friends.

I wondered what I’d forget – it had been so long since I’d setup with my Deep Space Imaging Equipment. I was sure I’d leave something at home, or take 2 hours to drift align, or forget how to focus. But fortunately, everything came together pretty well – the only thing that didn’t go to plan was my digital compass – the battery was flat!

After eyeballing south, drift aligning went remarkably quickly – I think I was just lucky. I only required a few minor adjustments in altitude and one tug of the mount in azimuth and there was very little drift over a couple of minutes, and that was accurate enough for me since I was just planning to do some widefield piggyback imaging.

I took my son Jacob up with me, and once I had set everything up to take automated exposures, we went observing through other people’s scopes. It was great to catch up with friends and I had some great views through Jakob’s 16″ lightbridge and Greg’s 14.5″ servocat and Argo Navis driven SDM. What a lovely bit of gear.

I had a really great time, and I think it’s just what I needed. I think the lack of social observing and astrophotography away from home has impacted my motivation and Saturday night was hopefully enough to give me a bit of a kick in the pants and do it more often. Next month I’ve got IISAC2009, which is also likely to help (as long as the sky is clear!).

Thanks for looking. I’ll hopefully post my widefield milkyway image later this week.

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