Thank you so much Lester, Paula, Liz, Daniel (*punch*
) & Pete- really appreciate all your very helpful advice and the pics you'll posted.
My apologies I took a couple of days to get back to you'll- I've been really busy.
We headed out to a nice dark spot we found some other time (during the day) which is a lovely picnic spot between Esk & Somerset (an hour's drive) and boy it looked so different at night, I was a bit spooked
.
When we were half way there, somewhere woop woop at a petrol station they had a sign saying free wifi so I went yipppppeeee and logged onto IIS on my phone to see if there were any tips for us and wow
there was lots of helpful stuff, and Pete you weren't too late for yours either. We took the laptop to connect up to the camera as we'd already read it does that before I got the camera. Anyway, there we were admiring such a beautiful night... clear... still... just divine. When we got to our spooky spot, which btw even spooked me out more when Russ told me there were Rabbit shooters overhead so I'm sure I went a ghostly white
because I thought it's spooky enough as it is was without having people roaming around in the dark over yonder. So there he was trying to calm me down while he was trying to set up the camera. We then moved away from the water bank and closer to where the entry gate is and that made me feel a bit better.
But you wouldn't believe it, as soon as we got there and got out of the car it was blowing a huge gale. The wind was stinging my eyes
it was that bad. We got to see the milky way for probably 10 mins before the clouds rolled in. So we didn't set up the laptop to connect to the camera and the 10" dob stayed in the car.
The trusty binos got a good run though. Still it was nice to see the little we did. We took some pics anyway between gaps- the strong wind and clouds certainly didn't help our first time trying to learn. But Russ took as much as he could despite and learned quite a bit, so it wasn't a total waste of time.
Oh and btw it's really hard to decipher clouds from the milky way at first
, we were scratching our heads at the dark nebula
look I said, who knew there were two coal sacks
. Then it became bleeding obvious
when the cloud got really bad. That was my first viewing of the milky way and cloud, never seen both together before (as you can see we don't get to see the milkyway all that often
). Sheeez talk about feeling like a total newbie.
And I can't believe I'm admitting this publicly on the internet
.
I haven't put our first attempt shots up - well I wanted to but Russ didn't,
because there was so much wrong with them- it didn't help with the wind blowing around the tripod.
We weren't given a good enough chance to really present a first pic, but would have loved to have done so tho.
Daniel, eeeeeeeek. Liz is right, I didn't want to hear that
, that was such a good buy. I bought this camera second hand (6mths old and still under warranty) from Gumtree (my first Gumtree purchase) after watching the classifieds for weeks. Plenty of people on there selling them second hand for around the $500 mark. When I rang WOW when they were having their supposedly big closing down sale a couple of weeks ago, they wanted around $600. So I thought if I could get it for around the $300 mark i'd be very happy. Sheeeeez would have been happier getting at Harvey Normans, doh!
Paula, thanks for those pics, there terrific! And so glad someone else on here has got the 1100 so I can ask questions about it.
Liz, those widefield scenic shots with the milkyway overhead is exactly what I want to do (or make Russ do
).
Could you please tell me what the settings were for those shots and what lens you used? I wonder if my camera is capable of doing the same thing
.
That pic with the eclipsed moon over the water and the house in the field are amongst my favourite pics of all time I just love them so much.