More love and joy on Christmas Day from Roma, QLD

[naskies]

Inspired by adman's expedition west of Brisbane (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=84544) to escape the clouds and join in the fun, I decided to do the same yesterday afternoon. I checked Skippysky and the closest location to Brisbane that was forecasted to have no cloud at all was near Roma (QLD).

After a six hour drive there, five hours under the amazing stars with a herd of cows for company, and a seven hour drive home - here's my handiwork:

1. Widefield of Lovejoy, the Milky Way and LMC/SMC. It's fairly representative of the naked eye views, except for the colour, very faint stars, and fine detail in the nebulosity. 2x 301 sec ISO 800 f/4 using a Canon 5DmkII + 14 mm f/2.8 on an Astrotrac Travel System.

2. Lovejoy and the Milky Way. 1x 30 sec ISO 800 f/1.4 using a Canon 20D + 24 mm f/1.4 on a fixed tripod.

3. Self portrait while shooting some DSOs. 1x 30 sec ISO 3200 f/2.8 using a Canon 20D + 14 mm f/2.8 on a fixed tripod.

4. Comet fading away during twilight. 1x 30 sec ISO 400 f/4 with the 5DmkII + 14 mm on Astrotrac.

This was the first time I saw the Milky Way cast a shadow... the sky was unbelievably dark! At home, I get a sky fog middle-histogram peak after 45 secs at f/4 and ISO 800... according to my test shots last night, I could have gone for over 20 mins there!

Thank you Santa for my best Christmas ever! :D

[renormalised]

Great piccies Dave:):)

2nd shot is quite dramatic :)

[jjjnettie]

How's the serenity!!

[gregbradley]

I like that 1st image the best.

One of the best I have seen of it so far.

It seems this comet is best with a fast widefield lens and tracked.

Greg.

[astronobob]

Great collection Dave, Dig the 1st most with the two mag Clouds, a top class Widey ! !

[Tilt]

All images are good, however the 1st one is amazing. Magnificent widefield!

[Liz]

Well done Dave for the trip outa town to view the comet at its best!! It has to be done doesnt it?

Wonderful images indeed. :thumbsup:

[Dennis]

Wow – thanks for these amazing views, your dedication and enthusiasm is inspirational, not to mention your photography skills!

Cheers

Dennis

[Quark]

Really nice work Dave, an excellent result indeed.

Regards
Trevor

[Matt Wastell]

Great road trip and images - congratulations on some exceptional images!

[suma126]

exellant shots love the first one :thumbsup:

[dpastern]

^^ what he said!

Dave

[shahgazer]

Superb! The 1st photo is my favorite!

[naskies]

Thanks everyone - it was a magical sight from a really dark site :)

The first super-wide-field is a universal favourite. The detail is very good with round stars in the centre viewed at 100%, but unfortunately it's rather noisy due to the continuous 5 minute exposures on the SLR. I'm going to run off a few dark/flat/bias frames to generate the final image - can't wait to print it out BIG.

Greg - I suspect you're spot on re tracking since the dynamic range of the twilight scene is surprisingly high. Here's the histogram from one of the unprocessed subs - foreground silhouette on the left, main yellow/green sky background in the lower third, and stars and nebulosity detail in the upper two-thirds. I'd love to shoot wide fields with a cooled CCD with large pixels on a "full-frame" chip (e.g. the KAI-11000 cameras) but they're still out of my price range.

Liz - I never thought I'd say this, but I have to thank the clouds in SE QLD because without them I wouldn't have driven out so far :screwy:

[h0ughy]

wow they are great shots - love the wide field shot. BTW those Astrotracs are the bees knees eh? i love mine

[naskies]

Thanks David - your great work with the Astrotracs and positive comments helped persuade me to go for it. That and someone offered me a virtually brand new unit at a bargain price :)

This is probably a sacrilegious thing to say around here, but I think I'm going to sell my EQ6 soon and just keep the AT :lol:

[adman]

Awesome shots Dave! Although I had my 17-40 on the camera, I only took mine at 40mm. Looking at yours and Terry's widefields makes me wish I had done the same.

Cheers
Adam

[h0ughy]

lol I have two - one with the pier and one to use with a tripod:thumbsup:

keep the eq6 - you never know when you need another mount :rofl:

[SkyViking]

Sounds like you had an awesome trip, and the images are beautiful!

[rogerg]

Good shots :) I love that wide FOV the 14mm gives you :) Wish I had one of them:)

Great to see another AT :) My AT is absolutely fantastic, provided some great shots this morning of the comet :)

[zardos123]

they are seriously dark skies, i find that after i go out to the really good skies i have withdrawal symptoms for a while:lol:, great shots, ya gotta be happy with that!!

regards brad

[naskies]

Thanks guys!

David - keeping an EQ6 as a "backup" mount for the AT seems a bit excessive :rofl:

Roger - 114 degrees diagonal field of view ;) I was about to sell mine from lack of use, then started learning how to make good compositions with such a large FOV. Now it's one of my favourite lenses!

Brad - unfortunately, I think you're right about withdrawal symptoms :( I look out the window at my bright pink featureless sky here and just get depressed!

[shelltree]

Wow, what beauties mate! I particularly love no.1 and no.2! So much detail and the Magellanic Clouds are so nice and bright as well! Looks like you had a great night :)

[naskies]

Thanks Shelley, I'm glad you managed to catch the comet in the end too.

Since the 14 mm wide field shot has been so popular, I scraped up all my test images from the depths of Lightroom, threw them into Photoshop's Automerge (panorama) function just to see what would happen. The initial result was pretty messy, but it showed potential - so I fiddled around with different combinations... and wow!

Here's a 175 degree panorama (measured horizontally, along the horizon) generated from four test shots and one of the "real" photos:

* 1x 121 sec f/4 ISO 3200 at 14 mm taken at 1:25 am
* 4x 301 sec f/4 ISO 800 at 14 mm taken at 3:04 am, 3:13 am, 3:37 am, and 3:43 am

One of Scorpius' pincers just peeks above the horizon on the left, as the Orion constellation is about to set on the right. If you look carefully, you can see that Barnard's Loop and some of the H-a nebulosity near Canopus is faintly visible (unmodded camera).

A larger 2000 pixel wide image can be found here (http://itee.uq.edu.au/~davel/_temp/Lovejoy-SuperWidefield-Large.jpg).

Hope you like it!

[shelltree]

:eyepop: Holy moly, that is just stunning! I love it!

[Adelastro1]

Very nice Dave! It gives you an idea of the scale of the comet, and everything else for that matter! Nice colours too.

[naskies]

Thanks Shelley and Wayne.

Well, after finally catching up on a bit of sleep I got around to processing my original wide field photo at high resolution with a manual alignment and stack of 3x 301 sec frames - I found another one that I'd missed earlier :lol: - in Photoshop with a drizzle factor of 3x.

Processing 21 megapixels x 9 (drizzle) x 3 subs = 567 MP using my 2009 era 13" MacBook Pro was a bit of a struggle, but it survived. The drizzling and third sub resulted in a noticeably smoother and richer image than the one in my original post.

I threw a roll of 24-inch wide Hahnemuhle Monet Canvas into the printer and ran the photo off as a 24x38 inch (61x96 cm) print. The attached pic shows the actual image pixels (left) and a quick iPhone snap of the canvas being printed (right). Hooray for colour-managed workflows :D The comet itself ended up about 20 cm long in the print.

I just have to seal the print with a protective spray, send it off to my framer for stretching, put a nail or two into a wall, and she'll be all good to go :)

[naskies]

I was inspired by RB's contrasty comet photos (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=84945), so I did some black & white repros - larger versions HERE (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13644418/2011-12-25-CometLovejoy-Roma-BW-Large.jpg) and HERE (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13644418/Lovejoy-Contrast-BW-Large.jpg).

I like the B&W version of #1 (landscape) since the conversion puts the visual emphasis on the comet, Milky Way, and Magellanic Clouds rather than the twilight/airglow/stars.

#2 in this repro is actually a stack of 17 subs, but the trailing due to the lack of tracking combined with the wide angle distortions doesn't work for me :(