Christmas imaging at the LMDSS

December 30, 2022

The December new moon happened on the 23rd. (Hence why I was outside on Christmas Eve doing some imaging in my backyard.) I had not thought about taking a trip up to the ASV’s dark sky site at all - despite it being an obvious time to get away from the Christmas madness and have some quiet time imaging.

When the Ice Queen suggested it, I was indecisive until she explained her reasons for saying I should go. So I booked a bunk room, packed my car full of gear and headed off on Boxing Day. I won’t bore you with how bad the traffic was, and how the freeways were packed with people heading off on holiday. Nor will I tell you about the heat of the day - 38 degrees Celcius and a sun strong enough to pummel you into the ground. After the winter we’ve just gone through, seeing blue skies and sunshine was a great relief.

When I got up there, a few ASV members were already present and we got to talking. Most of them I already knew so it was a case of catching up with them whilst waiting for the sun to go down.

When it was eventually dark enough, the night sky was perfect - no clouds, good seeing, and the Milky Way was visible with the naked eye in a huge arch across the sky from horizon to horizon. There was enough starlight (and a bit of reflected light pollution) that you didn’t need lights to walk around.

I had two setups running - the Star Adventurer and DSLR, and the HEQ5 and astro-cam. Getting the Star Adventurer polar aligned was (very surprisingly!) a lot less stressful than usual. I had it aligned and running very quickly. With the 14mm lens on, I was happily taking long sequences of the galactic core - the intention being to use them as backgrounds for astrolandscape images. Whether I use them is another question.

With the big rig, I wanted to capture M45 (The Pleiades) as I can’t really see them from home. Sadly, I messed up the imaging train and left the L-Enhance filter in there (along with an extra 21mm spacer). So not only did I filter out a lot of the data, I had a terrible time getting everything into focus. If you look at the image below, you’ll see diffraction spikes on the stars. Yes, I cheated and put my diffraction filter onto the scope. Why? Because the Pleiades look boring and unexciting without the spikes.

After the Pleiades, I wanted to capture NGC3199 (The Banana Nebula). Again, because it’s one I can’t easily see from home. This DSO is an emission Nebula, so the L-enhance was perfect to help bring out the Ha data. The image below contains just over an hour of data, and I really need to capture a lot more to expose all the fine detail present in the nebula.

I called it quits at about 3am and crawled off to bed for some much-needed sleep.

The second day was equally hot, but the breeze managed to take the edge off the heat. It was a bit on the overly-warm side of comfortable, but it was a dry heat which is far more tolerable than a wet or humid heat.

This time I took the DSLR off the Star Adventurer and used the static tripod so that I could capture star trails and also make a time-lapse movie of the stars rotating. I grabbed some more astrolandscape shots, and these turned out to be the highlight of the night.

Why were my “lowly” DSLR images the highlight? Because the skies clouded over - despite every forecast predicting clear skies. There were some very unhappy people on both the imaging and visual fields. Eventually, I packed up at about 1:30am when it was obvious the clouds were not going to disappear.

Wednesday dawned cool and cloudy, and yes, it rained as well. Thankfully everyone’s gear was either covered up or packed away so there was no risk of damage.

The sky forecast is pretty mixed for the next few days, so I will drag the gear out and see if I can improve on these deep-sky images from home.

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