The main aim of our Lake Tyrell trip was to get away from the city for a few days, explore the region a little and for me to get some astro imaging done in a near-perfect dark sky location.

The cloud forecasts were looking a bit dodgy (and they were) for the first two nights of our stay. I did manage to get some landscape shots, though.

One ‘defect’ with the tourist viewing platform / area is the approach road. Anyone coming to the site at night will be pointing their headlights directly at the platform. Any night vision adaptation you have or any image you happen to be taking will be ruined.

We finally got some clear skies here and I took advantage of a few scant hours of good viewing (before the humidity ramped up and mist rolled in) to grab more data of NGC5128 (aka Centaurus A).

You can read about my previous capture of the galaxy here - along with all the interesting information from Wikipedia.

For the first image here, I combined the data from my previous session with the new data to get a composite image. As with all astro work, more data makes for better images.

We finally had some clear nights and I was able to get the rig out and do some imaging. After spending so much time going after nebulae, it was a change of pace to aim for something a bit less dramatic. Not that a stellar cluster is any less dramatic, they’re a lot easier to image and process.

The data for all three images below was collected from my light-polluted back yard, and each image has been stacked and had it’s initial processing carried out in three different programs. Affinity Photo, Astro Pixel Processor and Siril v1.2.0b2. All images had their final post-processing completed with Affinity Photo.

Trying again with a mosaic of Eta Carina

One thing I found when working on the Eta Carina mosaic was the large amount of stacking artefacts around the edges of the frames. For a normal image this is not a problem as you just crop those bits off. When you’re building a mosaic, however, you need all the image and can’t lose any of the borders. Also, the stacking artefacts can cause problems when you come to stitch the panels together. As I found out…

One feature of Kstars that I’ve been curious to try out is the ‘Mosaic’ feature, buried in the ‘Sequencer’ page. I watched a few YouTube videos so that I got an idea of how it worked and then decided to give it a try on the next clear night.

The selected Target? The Eta Carina nebula, of course. It’s big, bright, and easy to find in the night sky.

Just for fun, I took some wide-angle shots with the Star Adventurer and DSLR whilst I was imaging Gum15.

They came out reasonably well, especially the SMC and LMC images. I’m quite impressed that the Tarantula Nebula is easily spotted. There appears to be a large number of potential targets in both of them, so I can see myself digging deeper into them.

The Galactic Core images are (IMHO) reasonable, but it’s very early in the ‘galaxy season’ and better images will be possible towards the middle of the year.

My method of selecting a DSO for imaging is rather relaxed and haphazard - I see what everyone else is doing and look elsewhere because I’m like that. I usually end up wandering through Stellarium or Telescopius looking for things that “look interesting”.

Gum15 is one of them - I saw it in Stellarium, but had no idea what it’s catalogue identifier was. A quick post on IceInSpace and I had my answer from the resident experts there. Thanks guys! Telescopius had a couple of images of it and some useful information - except for one important value: the surface magnitude (aka brightness).

Well, I didn’t expect to be posting this image here.

With all the furore and hubbub surrounding the “Green Comet” in the media I joined pretty much every astronomer in the world in trying to see it.

The media never really made it clear that the comet was faint and hard to see, so I expect there were some very disappointed would-be viewers.

To be totally honest - I didn’t see it either, and I was using a telescope. I did, however, set up the camera and fire off a sequence of images where I thought the comet would be. I got very lucky, as the comet was right on the edge of my field of view. Any further to the left and I would have missed it.

Another clear night, and another chance to take the rig out and capture more photons.

I haven’t been having much luck with imaging nebulae lately, so I thought I’d have a shot at another open star cluster. They’re (relatively) easy to image, and provide good practise in removing a lot of background noise and gunk from the images.

To cut a long story (mostly) short, the night started out with the usual hassles of getting the telescope focussed and then getting the imaging under way after deciding the best exposure time. (By keeping the gain, offset and temperature the same I can concentrate on fiddling with the exposure for the best images. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.)

Maybe not as much of a “wall of text” this time… Maybe.

I went up to the LMDSS for Australia Day, as the cloud forecast was for clear skies. It helped that I had taken the next day (a Friday) off work to make a very long weekend. Sadly, I wasn’t able to stay for Friday night - and it was forecast to have clear skies as well.

I had both rigs out that night - the Star Adventurer was taking 50-image series of various parts of the night sky. I don’t know what I’ll do with them yet, but I’m certain they’ll be used for something. Eventually. Maybe another astro-landscape or something.