Phil's blog

Following my review of the Star Adventurer, Skywatcher have now introduced a "mini" version of their astrophotography and timelapse platform in a smaller and app controlled version. This review describes my first month using 'SAM', which proves to be very easy to learn and use. Control via the Skywatcher app is intuitive and effective, the mount itself is very compact and it delivers impressive tracking performance for its size. In short there's a lot to like. Read the full review below.

The evening 'highlight' of six days back country skiing in NSW with Tim and Eric was the planetary alignment of Venus, Mercury and Jupiter in the evening sky. I had only a compact Canon Powershot G1X Mark II with me and it took a few nights to get the weather and scenery to cooperate but after an hour of trapsing around and lying down in the snow and wind I managed to capture this shot on our last night out.

Planets align over snowy mountains under moonlight (from bottom Venus, Mercury, Jupiter)
Canon Powershot G1X Mark II, Panorama 2 x 10 secs, f3.5, ISO400

First light with my observatory just barely functioning in April 2016.

Mars and its Rival Antares and the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex
CDS-5D, Canon 200mm lens, 110 * 2mins , ISO800.

Skywatcher were not the first to offer portable tracking mounts but the Star Adventurer unit is a very capable and complete package. It is heavier but also has a more substantial payload than the competing options and it did feel much more comfortable supporting my full frame Canon camera and 200mm lens. Once you go beyond wide angle lenses, tracking accuracy still limits you to quite short exposures but a lot can be achieved with this portable 'track and stack' approach. The combination of flexible tracking rates, quality built-in polar scope and latitude base plus the suitability for timelapse should make this quite an attractive option.

This will make more sense if you have previously read about our first year at Mount Glasgow. 2015 was more settled and sensible for Kaz and I but we still kept pretty busy!

Inspired by Harald Moltke - Painter of the Aurora

There are two key messages about what you see in this video:

• All of the digital imagery is animated and displayed in real-time.
• Colours have been de-saturated to match the visual appearance.

It's no surprise that seeing the aurora is on many people's 'bucket list'. But with the proliferation of digital images and timelapse videos of the aurora, those same people may travel with unrealistic expectations of what they will see with their own eyes.

My Shooting Stars eBook will help you with great information about using any digital SLR for night sky photography. In particular, the field guide includes information on where to find the ten most common night sky photography settings on the dials and menus of all of these DSLR camera models:

Canon:

• 700D/Rebel T5i, 650D/Rebel T4i, 600D/Rebel T3i, 550D, 500D, 450D
• 1200D/Rebel T5, 1100D/Rebel T3, 1000D/Rebel XS
• 70D, 60D, 50D, 40D, 30D, 20D
• 6D, 5D Mark III, 5D Mark II, 5D, 7D Mark II, 7D
• 1DX, 1DC, 1Ds Mark III
  

What a ripper of a comet! Another Christmas special discovered by Australian comet hunter Terry Lovejoy. In the days after Christmas I enjoyed a several late nights photographing this comet and its beautiful tail. So much fun but so much data my computer was grinding to a halt!

29th December

2014-12-29 1450 UT Click to view larger size on SmugMug

Our story for 2014 really goes back to 30th August 2013 with a property ad in the Earth Garden magazine that Kaz was reading. I think she was surprised that I took the bait on this one :-). For the next step we will be forever grateful to Kris and Andy who carefully chose and accepted our offer to take on their beautiful central goldfields home and continue what they had built, grown and developed over seven years. Thanks Kris and Andy.

I've used a few modified Canon DSLR cameras over the years for my astrophotography, including an Astro40D from Central DS which I used for many years of widefield astrophotography including one of my favourite ever images of the Southern Cross region.

With a new home (at least part-time) under dark skies I decided it was time for an upgrade and took the plunge with the CDS-5D (see disclosure below). This is my review of the camera, which will be updated with more tests and images.

CDS-5D with Pentax 300mm lens
Single 5 minute sub-exposure, f5.6, ISO800