I woke up at 2:00am and looked out of the bedroom window and saw that it was clear. In less than 1 hour, I had the car packed with camera gear and my EM200 Mount and headed off to find skies a little darker than those of suburban Brisbane.
Just after 4:00am, after an 85 km drive, I found myself on the Esplanade at Toorbul and began to set up 100 metres or so from the car. It took me a while to figure out how everything fitted together again, then polar align and I was off.
I fitted a Canon EOS R5 with RF 15-35mm F2.8L lens and began a series of test shots and alighted on 30 secs, F5.6 at ISO1600. The lens promptly dewed up, so I went back to the car for the Pocket Powerbox Advance (PPBADV) and a 12V DC SLA battery and fitted a dew heater, managing to plug the 12V DC IN to the IN Socket (physically it is a 2.1 mm DC input female socket, just like the 4 x 12V DC Power outlets and the Adjustable Out as well). Wouldn’t do to get this wrong in the dark…
Remarkably, I had everything I needed as I didn’t have a plan as this was an impromptu decision to just go for it, so I just began shooting using the built-in Interval Timer of the EOS R5.
I used the Focus Assist “Green Triangles” to manually focus, but when I checked again after a few shots, I noticed that all the images were OOF – probably a result of the dew strap tugging on the lens, as it was fitted over the focus ring, as I had nowhere else to position it.
Part way through the session, the PPBADV Blue LED began blinking so I went back to the car for the back up 12 VDC SLA and fitted that. I took this opportunity to point the camera up and grabbed a couple of shots towards the Zenith. Luckily, these came in use later as in those 3 images, I had also picked up Saturn. Sadly, Pluto was behind the trees by this stage.
PixInsight did a fantastic job of aligning and stacking the disorganized, chaotic set of files I emptied into it, although I had to manually blend in those lucky shots of Saturn in PS CC.
I have included crops of each target to provide some more detail on these regions.
Cheers
Dennis