After weeks of clouds and rain, we finally had a couple of clear nights. I dragged all the gear outside and setup in the near-gloom that passes for darkness within my light polluted suburb.

To the front of my residence are two street lights, to the north are 2-storey townhouses that block out the lower 30 degrees of the sky, my house is to the south-east, and the neighbour is to the south-west. So my visible bit of the sky is a strip running East to West, with a south-facing section that is more light pollution than stars. Let’s just say that trying to shoot anything wide-angle is not going to work at all well.

We’re out of our latest CV19 lockdown (supposedly a “1-week, snap lockdown” that turned into 12 weeks. This has gifted Melbourne with the title of “Longest total CV19 lockdown in the world”. Not something to be proud of, and a sign of our government’s inability to maintain a functioning Public Health Service.)

What better way to celebrate a clear night than a trip to the coast to take some astro images?

Well, that was an adventure in frustration.

In no particular order, the following gremlins tried to stop me getting some imaging done.

• Massive amounts of light pollution keeping the sky bright so I had massive troubles getting the polar alignment right
• My very limited view of the sky - nothing to the north, the house to the south-east, the neighbours to the south-west
• The outside light on next door’s house that kept coming on and turning night into day
• Rolling bands of cloud
• My target being to the west, so it was descending in the sky - where the 2m tall fence is
• Having the wrong white-balance on the camera. HTF did I manage to set it to a custom (5000K) setting???

On the plus side, my light pollution filter arrived from Hong Kong in 1/3 of the estimated arrival time.

I went up to the ASV dark sky site one weekend when there were no clouds. Oddly enough, there weren’t any other people there and until the sky darkened and the 2/3 full moon was casting shadows everywhere, I could not work out why…

However, I put the time to good use and practised getting the star tracker polar aligned. And it worked - about 5 minutes of effort, and I had near perfect alignment! Yay!! I looked at the images and there was zero star drift. That alone made my night.

The ASV held their ‘Deep Sky’ section meeting at the LMDSS on July 10th and I wanted another chance to get more images of the sky, and hopefully at a higher magnification / focal length than my last few efforts. (50mm / 75mm effective is OK, but all the cool Deep Sky Objects (or DSOs) are too small to really see.)

Most of these images were taken with a 90mm (135mm effective) lens. Hopefully I will be able to use a longer focal length next time (although the aperture will be a lot smaller) and get some better ‘close up’ images. The hard part will be getting the camera aimed at the correct location, and having the DSO framed properly.

I have just tried my hand at using a star tracker (to eliminate any star trails caused by the earth’s rotation) and stacking photos with a program called ‘Sequator’. Whilst I’m happy with how this images turned out, I still have a long way to go with post-processing (and getting the tracker properly aligned with the South Celestial Pole) before I’ll be truly happy with my work.

I used ‘AuroraHDR’ to manipulate the colours and to make the stars stand out.

Did I mention that I joined the Astronomical Society of Victoria? No? Well, I did, so I could meet other astro nuts and learn from them.

About a week after I joined (and created a FarceBook profile so I could join their astrophotography group) they announced a “Boot Camp” for astrophotographers. I was hooked, and put my name down for it straight away.

I won’t bore you with details, but I did manage to get one good image from the night’s work. I failed to get the star tracker aligned accurately, so there was a noticeable amount of drift between each frame, but Sequator sorted that out. A bit of fiddling with Affinity Photo and I had this:

On the same day as I took the Jupiter and Saturn image, the moon was a thin crescent in the western sky.

A bit of zooming and cropping of the image gave me this second image. The detail is a bit soft, and there is a good amount of chromatic aberration. These effects are due to the lens I was using. A better quality lens would give a better photo than this.

In late December 2020, the planets Jupiter and Saturn appeared to converge into one object in the night sky. This isn’t exactly true - Saturn ‘disappeared’ behind Jupiter when viewed from Earth on that particular day.

I wasn’t able to get a better photo than this one - the planets were low to the horizon so I was seeing them through a much thicker amount to atmosphere with all the associated dust and light scattering turbulence. I also had a lot of trouble focussing the camera lens to get anything remotely sharp. So I’m not happy with this photo - I feel that I could have done a lot better.