Friday Nite Celestial Goodness 6/12/13

[cazza132]

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

[LightningNZ]

Geez, nice collection! Wish I could afford a 6D, they look brilliant.
Cheers,
Cam

[cazza132]

Thanks Cam! Yeah, the 6D goes pretty good for night work. Great value for a full frame camera. They may even become a sub $1300 camera in 6 months hopefully.

[nebulosity.]

Wow!! impressive images mate :thumbsup:

Thanks for the info about the rocket dump, I saw it as well and it had me wondering what on earth it could be.

Cheers
Jo

[John Hothersall]

Love the star trail reflections on the car. Looks like a great DSLR.

John.

[Ross G]

Great collection of photos Troy.

Love the Andromeda photo.

Great looking star trails with the car.

The 6D has excellent quality.

Ross.

[strongmanmike]

Lovely collection Troy...your forte really is nightscapes especially star trails huh?...that Mitsubishi star trails shot is a classic...better let Mitsubishi have a look ;)

Mike

[cazza132]

Thank you Ross, Mike and John :)
he 6Ds are going well :) Have a slight problem with the full spectrum 6D with amp glow to one side of the frame. Dark frame subtraction can eliminate part but not all. Only affects 5% of the frame, so is not too bad.
Also, I have figured out a way of reducing the star sizes using Fitswork that I have only utilized with the wide field Orion nebulae complex shot that I posted here. The Andromeda, Pleiades, Horsehead and M42 shots would greatly benefit from this.
Does anyone have suggestions for good astro software for DSLRs? Fitswork has proven to be pretty good at extracting dynamic range, but there are so many aspects of this program that I just do not understand. I have tooled around with it, but I have found very limited information on the net to get the full use of it.

Cheers, Troy

[dutch2]

Fantastic set of images.
Great job, well done.:thumbsup: