Your Mileage May Vary » night

Casino by night.

Dan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:59:05 +0000

I gave my brother a tripod for his birthday, then took him out to teach him how to use it. This is one of my photos – the Treasury Casino in “green mode”.

Dark Sky Observing outside Brisbane.

Dan — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 05:59:41 +0000

A week ago I bought a small telescope to indulge my childhood dreams of backyard astronomy. Within three nights, just sitting in my backyard, I’d seen Mars, Saturn, the Orion Nebula and managed to identify a handful of constellations and bright stars. Last night, I took advantage of the new moon and went out to Mt Pleasant with a friend to hunt down some more Deep Sky Objects.

We found a little cul-de-sac off Mt Brisbane Road (about an hour’s drive out of town) with almost no light pollution (certainly none that mattered) and unobstructed views of the sky from about 10° above the horizon. This, coupled with ZERO clouds meant for absolutely breathtaking views of the Milky Way. The Orion Nebula was easily found with the naked eye, as were the The Pleiades – viewing them through even my little ’scope showed them as a beautiful, bright cluster.

Over the next 4 hours or so we also viewed Mars and Saturn (the easiest planets to find), the Jewel Box (NGC 4755 is its official designation) and the Beehive Cluster (M44/NGC 2632, depending on which catalog you’re following. Some photos were taken by my Nikon D60 and 200mm zoom lens, but most of the night for me was spent hunting DSOs with my telescope, teaching Pat the basics of photography, or just looking up.

The photo at the top of this post is a long-ish exposure photograph of our setup under the sky. The red lines are the two of us poring over a book of star charts with red torches. The two bright, white star trails in the centre of the image are actually Alpha and Beta Centauri – the two brightest stars in Centaurus and better known as the two stars that point to the Southern Cross.

Starshots.

Dan — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:14:07 +0000

Lately, Luke and I have been interested in the night sky. I want a telescope of some sort, and he’s been wanting to try photographing star trails. Star trail shots seemed like a fun way to get into it all, so last night I suggested we head out away from the light pollution of the city.

After a brief encounter with some cows, we ended up setting up right here. I was playing around with longer exposures all night (with varying results) and Luke set up a laptop to take a series (200) of shorter (15 second) shots. That took an hour, but it worked out quite nicely.

The other shots I found worthy of uploading are all here.

Brisbane by night.

Dan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:46:06 +0000

Luke suggest going out to get some photos of Brisbane last night. Vincent and I agreed. Click the above photo to see what I ended up with.