Ok here goes again..I am trying to use the attach button to add an image..lets see if it works this time
Hello everyone, this is my first post here and I am not sure if this isnt a bit off topic but anyway I want to share my experience of an interesting astro mini break that I enjoyed last week.
I managed to take a couple of days off and head to the
Magellan Observatory
http://home.goulburn.net.au/~magellan/
which offers a farmstay coupled with access to some serious equipment.
It's only less than three hours out of Sydney so I could leave after work and still get there just after dark. But it is far enough from both Sydney and Canberra to offer really dark skies.
The “emu” in the Southern Milky Way was a spectacular naked eye sight, as for example was the Tarantula in the Large Magellanic Cloud; M31 and M33 were easy targets with my 7 x50 binos.
The deal is great-you stay in the farm house and get access to the Observatory and all its equipment, and the owner, Zane, is available to help you along, if like me you have never actually used a proper CCD camera before, or are otherwise unfamiliar with the use of the digital setting circles or any of the other gear.
I only got to stay there for two nights-got clouded out early the first, but not before some stunning visual observation of Tuc 47, the Saturn nebula-blue and bright and tiny with the appendages clearly visible-the Helix, NGC 253 and NGC 55 through the 18 inch scope f/4.5(NGT 18) with a 16 mm Nagler
The following day I had use of the observatory's 60 mm refractor with a Coronado Solar Max H alpha filter and was able to observe a number of fascinating solar prominences before once again cloud intervened. The farm was stocked with Astronomy, Sky and Space magazines going back some twenty years as well as a whole bunch of books including Ron Wodaski's “The new CCD astrophotography” and so on so there was plenty of astronomy related stuff to keep you occupied if you were bored with the kangaroos and other wildlife around the farm or the videos or paperbacks on offer.
That night was clear though and we (my son and I) decided to focus on imaging-just to get a sort of first hand feel for what real CCD imaging was all about.
The imaging setup consisted of a a 100 mm F5 apochromatic refractor on a Losmandy G11 mount and an Sbig ST8i CCD camera. The mount was auto guided with a _Celestron Pixcel 255 CCD camera through a 12 inch Meade. Gearhead heaven!!
We imaged three objects-chosen as easy targets -and here is the first of these- the Tarantula nebula in the LMC. The original was 4 mEG plus bitmap, so the image here has had a fair bit of compression applied to it.
We also acquired the Horsehead and Flame nebulae and finally M33, but I still need to do some processing on these.
Just for the heck of it I took along my little ETX 70 and webcam and imaged the Tarantula with this set up at the same time as we were imaging through the 4 inch apo...I won't post that image in this thread though!!
We finished up with the imaging at about 2 am and then headed back to the farmstay, hauled the 10 inch Dob out into the patio and observed till the moon finally came up at about half past three, with the odd wombat keeping us company.
All in all a great little mini astro break and I'll probably be going back.
