[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Originally Posted by RickS

Seems to be a remarkably tricky object to do well. Very nice job, Mike!

Thanks Rick. Glad you like it. Actually the most difficult thing about the last shoot was we invited the neighbours up to watch us set up for the night. 4WD through the paddocks. Great expectancy. RA motor wouldn't work. The mighty detective (that's me) quickly found a never-soldered connection on the motor control board. It had worked fine for 5 years! Dodging cows and horses, back to the house. Fixed in 2 minutes, but we were too nervous to take the army of guests back up in case it put the mokkers on it. Worked fine of course. The guests watched "Who framed Roger Rabbit" while we photographed.

Originally Posted by Ross G

A great looking closeup photo Mike. Well composed. As always, amazing detail and sharpness. I like the description as well. Ross.

Thanks muchly Ross. The composition required a lot of cropping at the bottom left. I can now see that there's a lot of really interesting faint stuff out of field toward top right. So if we were to start again next year, we might put the full frame to include more at top right.

Originally Posted by multiweb

Great image scale and details Mike. Looking at the ESO pic I thought yours should be the benchmark

Cheers, Marc ! There's a great 4 page article in this month's AS&T about how most behemoth (8 metre) telescopes don't work as planned, e.g. they don't hold collimation. Lovely problem to have, though.