Friday Nite Celestial Goodness 6/12/13
Had a fun Friday night at Camp Duckadang, SE QLD. Had two 6Ds running - one for deep sky and the other for nightscapes.
At about 9pm, we spotted a strange streak. Looked like a huge comet, but was moving too fast for that. I could not believe my eyes! We couldn’t come up with an answer for this strange phenomenon at the time. It started overhead and slowly moved westward over a period of 10 minutes and spanned more than 90 degrees across the sky. It ended up being a rocket fuel dump from a Centaur stage of an Atlas V rocket launched December 6th (7:13 UT) and it passed over Australia, setting at about 9:10 local time, 11:10 UT.
Settings n setup:
Deep space astro: Full spectrum 6D with visible + Ha pass on lens filter, Astrotrac. Polar alignment via drift method. 400mm, f5.6, ISO3200. Used a 200mm at f2.8 on the Orion nebula complex.
Wide field nightscapes: Conventional 6D with 17mm tse at f4.0 for the rocket fuel dump and a 14mm at 2.8 Samyang for star trails. ISO6400
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