On Saturday night, I headed out to the Mangrove Mountain Pony Club for the first time since January, to do some social observing with friends, and some widefield photography away from home.

The image below is the outcome from the night – a widefield Milkyway image taken with my Canon 350D and 28mm f/2.8 lens, piggybacked on my ED80/EQ6.

Click the image for a 1200px wide version (600kb jpeg).

The Milkyway Galaxy at the Pony Club. Click to view 1200px wide version.

Given it was my first image in so long, I’m quite happy with how it turned out. Drift aligning went smoothly and quickly, I didn’t forget to take anything, and generally it all went as well as I could’ve hoped. Continue reading for more details about the capture and processing.

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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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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.