Anthony's Astrophotography

Well it feels like a distant dream now from my great trip to the Queensland Astrofest 2012. I was so looking forward to it that I had my leave booked in for the event from February this year and simply could not wait for the 10^th August to get here; as I don’t own a time machine yet I just had to be human and wait.

Well the 10^th did arrive just as the sun rises each day I was ready with the car packed literally to the roof (in fact it was so full the tent was strapped to the roof racks on top). It’s quite a drive (about 2.5 hours from Brisbane) so I was a little worried I might get there less the tent, but I made it without issue.

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I have been flat out with work and family commitments lately so I haven’t been able to post anything new for a while. When I saw this picture I could not resist the tempatation to post.

Credits to the Author (I do not know who they are but will happily credit them if they tell me)

Another image I managed to take at the BAS weekend club event was the Sombrero Galaxy. This image was taken on Saturday 20th May 2012, at around midnight at Hazeldean QLD, Australia. The seeing conditions were about an 8.5 /10. I used my Canon EOS 600D DSLR to take the image and the exposure times were as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Hi Everyone,

I was playing around with my home made Solar filter (will write up an article soon) and couldn’t wait to get a happy snap so shoved it on my Megrez 90 with Camera in toe and took some shots of our nearest star, these were taken with the telascope sitting in my lap with the Canon EOS 600D live view to help focus and aim, I was pretty happy with the results considering how awkwardly I was sitting.

looks like I am almost ready for the Venus Transit on the 6th June 2012.

Hope you enjoy

This months BAS Club event was a particularly good event with a great turn out of both BAS and SEQAS members it was almost difficult to find a patch of dirt to set up on :). This time around and given it was such a good evening I had several targets in mind and some I was told about while I was there.

This image was taken on Saturday 20th May 2012, at around 11:00 PM in Hazeldean QLD, Australia. The seeing conditions were about an 8.5/10 as there was a lot still some moisture in the air and the light pollution from Brisbane was still very visible. There was a forecast for rain so we were still quite lucky.

I used my Canon EOS 600D DSLR to take the image and the exposure times were as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Hi All,

A quick note to let you know that registration is now open for the 2012 Queensland Astrofest, you can check out more details here. I have only been for one night last year but really enjoyed the atmosphere and I am going to spend the full 9 days there this year.

Cheers

Anthony

I am often asked how big things are in the night sky and I have always struggled with a good explaination as it really is difficult to visualise and explain. Well I think I have found the solution (no it’s not a worm hole or warp speed travel to go and see these things) and it comes in the form of some very well presented video’s from Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org).

They have a range of video’s delving into topics such as Math’s, Finance, the Sciences and even cosmology, the ones I have seen so far were excellent for putting into perspective on the scale of objects in our Universe.

Specifically there is a 5 part series and it has the following films available for viewing:

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On Sunday the 6th May at about 1:00 PM AEST the Moon will be at full perigee (its closest approach to Earth at a distance of ~356,000 kilometers away), it will also be just past the point of full moon and the two coinsiding events result in a Super Moon.

So what does a Super Moon mean for us earthings? Does this mean massive storms, super tides that will flood our cities, riot as people go crazy from the full moon, warewolves attcking innocent people? No nothing quite that exciting, but if you get the chance to get out and have a look at the moon riseing or setting it will be a rewarding experience.

For those of us in Australia we will miss the exact time this happens as the moon will be below the horizon, however you can see the moon rise at around 5:00 PM and it should appear noticibly bigger than usual (in fact about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than normal).

Below is a video that explains the process and how these Super Moons come about:

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Light, Dark, Flat and Bias Frames. What are these and how do you create and use them to make your images better.

I struggled with these file types for a while when getting started so thought I would write up a small bit of detail about what they are and what they do. I hope this helps explain their purpose and their importance when processing quality images.

Light Frames – Light Frames are the actual images you have taken of celestial objects that contain the valuable data that you want others to see. The key objective is to get enough data (actual photon’s of light) to reduce the Signal to Noise Ratio. All the other frame types are used to reduce or remove the noise in you Light Frames.

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Well as you probably know I am a member of the BAS and we have regular club events out at Hazeldean once a month. This month was a particularly good event with a great turn out of both BAS and SEQAS members so all up around 25 Telescopes and 40 – 50 people gathered. I thought I would take the opportunity to try my first image of a Galaxy and see how it turned out.

This image was taken on Saturday 21st April 2012, at around 10:30 PM in Hazeldean QLD, Australia. The seeing conditions were about an 8/10 as there was a lot of moisture in the air, this was still pretty good considering rain was forecast :).

I used my Canon EOS 600D DSLR to take the image and the exposure times were as follows:

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