I don't usually post this many shots but I'm on holidays at the moment and the opportunity to get out there and image around new moon is possible. These were taken while I had a few days with my wife down near Mallacoota in far east Victoria. I lucked it out with a few cloud free nights but it was rather warm and transparency could have been better but hey, who could complain about being in a bortle 1 location? You make the most of what you get.
I was looking forward to shooting the Witch Head nebula in such dark skies but I had done just as well on this closer to Melbourne on previous outings so I was quite disappointed with the outcome. I increased the iso so that I could maintain good stars to the edges by stopping down the 200mm zoom lens to f 8 as well as shooting 4 minute unguided subs on the HEQ5pro to gather more light. Being a warm night, I don't think my camera sensor liked exposing for 4 mins and got rather warm.
I had to do some radical noise reduction in post processing and the image quality has suffered considerably. I used over 80 mins of data on it so transparency was obviously poor and I expected a much better result with that amount of integration time.
Exposure details:
Witch Head, unmodded Canon 550d no filter 21 X 4 mins, 200mm @ f 8, 3200 iso unguided HEQ5pro mount.
Orion region, modded Canon 550d UVIR cut filter 47 X 30 seconds, 50mm @ f 2.8, 3200 iso. Nano Tracker on tripod.
LMC and SMC modded Canon 550d UVIR cut filter 5 X 3 mins, 50mm @ f 4, 800 iso. Nano Tracker on tripod.
