A newbie,passionate photographer & my love affair with Lovejoy!

[Gerry]

G'day I'm newbie from Gold Coast,been reading these forums for the past week or so.

I'm so grateful to twitter (someone posted a link) that I found this website, it's amazeballs!

I'm primarily a pro music photographer. Though I've always had a love affair with the night sky, capturing significant events. Being born a Taurean night owl, getting out at obscure hours to photograph things is nothing new. I'm definately amongst friends here it looks like!

Thought I'd share some of my Lovejoy pics taken over the past week. I really wish I'd known about this earlier (only read it in the paper).

Enjoy!
http://flic.kr/s/aHsjxAJ8rr

I have one question I wanted to have answered by you experts, haha, if you don't mind. Can someone give me info about the bright mass that appears to the left (10-15cm) of the top star of two bright stars under the crux. Is that a supernova? Please forgive me for my lack of knowledge of star names/terminology etc.

Thanks in advance

Gerry

[renormalised (Carl)]

Hi Gerry and welcome to IIS

Love your piccies...really colourful

That bright "blob" is actually a globular cluster (basically a big ball of stars) called Omega Centauri (NGC5139). It consists of several million stars and weighs in at 5 million times the mass of the Sun. It's around 15800 light years away (that's 94800 trillion miles!!!!). Means you're going to have to carry a few spare jerry cans of fuel to keep the car going!!!!.

[Gerry]

Thanks very much Carl for that info!

[renormalised (Carl)]

No sweat.....feel free to ask anytime

[Gerry]

In terms of productivity this morning, I scored a ZERO,

After getting a pretty cool shot
http://flic.kr/p/b3RgVe I decided I'd go looking for another location (as this location the sugar mill in the bottom of pic was giving off too much light)

So then the clouds started to follow me, what's with these darn clouds
Eventually after trying several locations I settled on this spot. http://flic.kr/p/b3Robe and more darn clouds.

It was about 10km from my early shot, having driven around like a headless chook, i'd lost so much time by then the sky started to wash out.

I guess I'll tempt fate again tomorrow.

[mishku]

to IIS, Gerry! You're right, it's totes amazeballs

Pro tip: Try a program called Stellarium. It's free to download, and I find it incredibly useful, because I'm a) bad at directions, b) can never quite work things out from a planisphere, and c) always want to know what the fuzzy blobs are

[acropolite (Phil)]

Gerry, welcome to IIS. Click on this link to see an image of your "bright mass" by IIS member strongmanmike. There are plenty of members in your area that get together regularly on new moon weekends, Ron (astroron) usually has a monthly get together at Cambrooon. Map here.

[renormalised (Carl)]

The best way to fool the cloud gods is to make very detailed plans, get ready to go where you planned to go and then suddenly take off in another direction!!!!

[Gerry]

Originally Posted by acropolite

Gerry, welcome to IIS. Click on this link to see an image of your "bright mass" by IIS member strongmanmike. There are plenty of members in your area that get together regularly on new moon weekends, Ron (astroron) usually has a monthly get together at Cambrooon. Map here.

Thanks Phil for the link and other info, what an awesome image.

[Gerry]

Originally Posted by mishku

to IIS, Gerry! You're right, it's totes amazeballs

Pro tip: Try a program called Stellarium. It's free to download, and I find it incredibly useful, because I'm a) bad at directions, b) can never quite work things out from a planisphere, and c) always want to know what the fuzzy blobs are

Thanks I'll check that program out