It was another cloudy new Moon weekend at my observatory at Leyburn, but on the Saturday night it cleared for about 3 hours and I was able to capture a few shots of the Milky Way with my 10-20mm f4 to f5.6 Sigma lens that was attached to the top of the telescope.

This is a great way of taking some lovely wide field images of the night sky; you can use your different lenses to capture very wide fields or just concentrate on taking pictures of the constellations.

You’ll need to set up your telescope in equatorial mode by polar aligning your mount or scope. If you live in the southern hemisphere like I do, then you’ll need to polar align on Sigma Octants in the constellation of Octants. If you live in the northern hemisphere it’s just a matter of aligning on the bright star Polaris and your off and running. It’s just so much easier for people who live in the northern hemisphere than us here in the land down under as Polaris is nearly right on the north celestial pole…how lucky you are :-)

The next thing you need to do, is attach your camera onto the top of the tracking telescope, there are many different attachments in doing this relevant to the type of telescope that you have. Just go to your manufactures web site or booklet and they should list the attachments there.

Now taking the images, if you are doing a wide field image the focus will be extremely difficult because the stars are so small, the best thing is to go to the brightest object in the night sky…. like one of the planets or a first magnitude star. Then use the live view in your camera, zoom in to 5+ then 10+ to focus, if you don’t have this feature, then draw the lens up close and try your best to get pinpoint stars.

Now for some test shots, bump up the ISO high (say 1600 or more) so you can take some short shots to see if you are in focus, the infinity sign on the lens is not always correct but if you want, you can start from there and work back. Keep taking images with the in camera long exposure reduction feature turned off so the image comes straight down without the camera doing the dark frame. The last thing you want, is to be waiting around for the camera to do the dark frame…. just make sure you turn it back on when you start to take your real images! 
If you’re doing dark frames ignore this advice.

When you think that all is in focus, you are now then ready to take some beautiful images of your night sky, if you have polar aligned correctly then you should be able to image for as long as you want…but be careful as some lenses have coma around the edges, if this happens, stop down the lens and try again until it’s minimal.

Have fun, and I hope you get some great images of your night sky :-)

~ The Southern Cross (Crux) & Pointers (Alpha & Beta Centaurus) with Omega Centauri ~

This was an unusual lunar eclipse because for the first time ever I was going to see a fully eclipsed Moon rise in the east as the Sun set in the west from my position here on the Gold Coast in South East Queensland.

But the day did not start out well at all, there was heavy rain in the morning then it cleared for a while which was long enough to capture a few images of the Sun, then the clouds came back again in the afternoon.  All around the horizon were large cumulus clouds…it was a wait and see situation!

Usually I would have set up my Meade 8inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope to take images but with the weather being so unpredictable I did not want to chance it. So I made ready my DSLR camera on a tripod with a 100-400mm lens and 2x converter, hoping that I may be able to capture a few images if it cleared.

At about 6.30pm you could just make out the faint outline of a very dark maroon colour Moon rising in the south-eastern part of the sky. I tried to get a couple of shots but there was just no detail at all just a fuzzy blob, just too much cloud and moisture in the sky!

But once the Moon rose higher where it was clearer, it looked just spectacular and was a gorgeous deep orange colour…the Moon was still working its way through thin cloud but I was now getting a few good images. I continued to take pictures until the Moon had passed through the Earths shadow and by 9.00pm the full Moon was back in the sky.

I used a Canon 7D camera with a 100-400mm lens and 2x converter on an ordinary tripod.  Working with this set-up is not really ideal for a fully eclipsed Moon because you have to use much slower exposure times (up to 5 seconds) it would have been so much better to have used my tracking telescope…but at least I got some images of the event and once the sunlight started coming back onto the Moon surface the images were just fine.

Please see below some images from this pretty Lunar Eclipse :-)

The Sun looked very pretty today with a sprinkling of Sunspots across its surface today, Tuesday the 15th April 2014.

The designated sunspots are from the right on the bottom (eastern limb) AR2035, then the funny shape one is AR2036 & AR3037, then over to the left are AR2034, AR2030 & AR2032. (AR means Active Region) You can see what the Sun looks like daily at spaceweather.com at http://spaceweather.com/

One single image orientated as seen in the camera lens, I used a Canon 7D camera with a 100-400mm lens fitted with a 2x converter and glass solar filter fitted. Exposure was 1/1500th second, ISO 400.

The Stardust club celebrated its 3rd birthday today on the 3rd April 2014 at the Runaway Bay Library on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia.

We had our birthday party with a yummy space cake and all the children had lots of fun learning about Black Holes, for some reason everybody just loves Black Holes!

The Stardust club is just for children aged between 6 and 12 years old where I introduce them to the wonders of our night sky in a fun and practical way…it’s also a wonderful way to share my love of the universe with such excited little minds.

Maybe one day one of these children will be a future astronaut or space traveller or even a discoverer of a new comet or asteroid…but all I really want at the moment is for them just to have a lot of fun learning about space :-))

The Stardust Junior Astronomy Club is held on the first Thursday of the each month and is free; please contact the library on (07) 55817220 for bookings.