16. Fred Watson draws the Lucky Door Prizes.
17. First Prize winner of the Andrews Communications telescope. (Mike can fill in the names here)
18. Second Prize winner of the Argo Navis by Wildcard Innovations was Geoff.
19. Third Prize winner of the subscription to Australian Sky & Telescope.
The sparklers were left unlit this year, but here are some more "red light" painting photos.
These were shot on Fred's camera with his fish eye lens, The Beatles Abbey Road model is Michael Samerski, and I'm responsible for over exposing with red light and the poor sky writing (damn fish eyes!)
Here is a time lapse video with Ian in the middle. 40D, stock lens.
What a wonderful memory that was!!!
The lesson I learned that evening after wasting four hours on trying to take photo's of the Tarantula Nebula was that when using your new fang dangled motorised focusers (on both the main tube and guide scope), make sure you undo the little screw that's locking the draw tube!!!!
The irony is that had I chosen to perform my focussing manually, I probably would have had some nice images of the Tarantula nebula.
Well, jamespierce and I are finally home! We went north to Lostock via Thredbo (Crackenback actually) where we had one really good night's viewing. IISAC was awesome, of course, although I think James is going to be get sick of my optimistic "I've seen it get good from worse!" From there we headed west, and stayed a couple of nights in the Warrumbungles, had two good nights' viewing (albeit cut short by cloud), and went to Siding Springs - the exhibition there is indeed, erm, tired. The AAT makes even Rod's 20" look small though.... And today, we've come home from Parkes, where we went to ogle The Dish - and stopped off to spend a few hours talking to Peter Read from SDM and drop off James' scope for a little 'holiday'. Truly an awesome, and very nerdy, holiday - thanks Mike for giving us the excuse to do it!
