OAS Star Party

[Graeme]

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to join the Orpington Astronomical Society Deep Sky Star Party at a dark site in the depths of East Sussex. It's been a while since I've been camping but I thought I would give it a go! The sky was dark enough to see the band of the Milky Way and quite mind blowing.

I didn't want to take my main telescope because the mount is still messing about. So I took my old colour astro camera, put a Canon lens on the front of it and mounted them on a fixed tripod. This arrangement doesn't track the rotation of the Earth so I was limited to 30 second exposures.

I captured an hour's worth of the Summer Triangle, or at least Vega and Deneb in Lyra and Cygnus. 43 were cloud free and worth stacking. There are a lot of stacking artifacts but I was quite pleased to have captured an image of this section of the Milky Way!

Summer Triangle_EL.jpg

[HansV]

Well done!

[stuck]

Looks impressive, especially as it sounds like you were using a makeshift setup.



Ken

[Graeme]

Thanks Hans

And Thanks Ken

The setup was a bit Heath Robinson! But the Canon lens was attached to the camera with a manufactured adapter and they were mounted on the tripod with a manufactured bracket albeit with stability improved with zip ties!

My report of the event is here. If anyone has too much time on their hands today!

Graeme

[stuck]

...anyone has too much time on their hands...

That would be me.

Yesterday I found myself pressure washing the brick-weave paving at the end of our drive. Even as I was doing it I was thinking, "How pointless an activity is this? You've lived here over 20 years and never bothered to do it before and it didn't look that bad before you started." But I had started so I had to finish.

Ken

[John Gray]

You've been watching too many "brick pavior pressure washing" videos on YouTube!
They always seem to end in tears...