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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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.