Queensland Astrofest 2001
August 13th to 19th
Camp Duckadang - Linville, Queensland, Australia - 152:16E 26:51S
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The road to Duckadang via Linville.
The Camp sits above the Brisbane River.
There was some fog late on the first two nights, but it stayed away from then on....Here it is staying away on Thursday morning as I was on my way to bed.
Some familiar Astrofest faces....
Four imagers all in a row...This is the area in front of the dining hall. There were many more scopes around the field and several others imaging around the place, but this is definately the spot that used the most electricity. TFO-Mobile is furthest on the right, next to Max Gilmister taking astrophotos (using a quaint technique that involves something called film :) with a 5" Tak, next is Brendan Downes doing automated Supernova searching with an ST7 and 12" LX200 (Brendan co-discovered Supernova 1997DE from this location), Dennis Simmons is next to Brendan and is imaging with an ST255 and Vixen 102mm refractor. Dennis claimed that I was stealing his photons with my superior aperture, but I would like to publically state, on the record, that this is not true!
My home for the week. I had a tent but I think I did more sleeping in the van. The rental van was very comfy and attracted loads of visitors over the week. with almost daily displays of images taken from TFO-Stationary. At one stage there were four adults in there! The two computers and 3 monitors helped to keep things warm which is probably why everyone wanted to be there! I know it helped keep me there anyway!
Telescope pointing, focus, and camera control is done by a Pentium 200 computer on the floor of the van, which is connected by a 100Tx network to a Gigahertz Pentium machine (with the 2 monitors facing out). The 1Ghz machine controls the P200 remotely. This allows file transfers, image processing and observation planning to continue concurrently with telescope/camera operations. So images can be processed as new ones are being taken...Did you know that it's very difficult to hire a black van? I really wanted a black one.
A great week of Imaging
The first night was great. After a leisurely 4-hour setup, the clouds of the day parted at sunset and it was a great night all the way up to when the fog rolled in around 11pm. I didn't mind, because I really only wanted to get the mount polar aligned and all of the equipment working. Tuedsay was an action replay of Monday. Clouds all day that departed at sunset, but this time the fog stayed away until about 1am. A little disappointing, but that was the end of it. From Wednesday on, there were nothing but perfectly clear, if not perfectly steady skies for the duration of the night.
NGC6559 in Sagittarius. This is a difficult object. I tried it years ago with a C8gpdx@1760mm+sxl8 camera but after 1.5 hours of exposures it still had little signal. From Duckadang with more sensitive everything, this was the result of 90 minutes worth of images taken over the two nights of the 15th and 16th. Using the magic of LRGB, the colour from the original image was used in combination with the 90-minute Luminance taken at Astrofest and this is the result.
NGC6744 in Pavo. Another very difficult object taken entirely on the night of the 16th and 17th. This is an LRGB image made up from many 5-minute images totalling 250 minutes... just over 4 hours! 1.5 hours was dedicated to Luminance, and another 50-minutes each through the RGB filters binned 2x2 (equivalent to 200 minutes through each filter unbinned!). This is one dim and difficult object!
M27 is normally too low in the north for me so it was on my target list for Duckadang. A test object for astro-photographers being quite big, bright and well-placed for northern and southern hemisphere observers. This picture consists of 80 minutes worth of exposures for the luminance detail alone.
M57 is also low in the north to rise above my neighbours house. I had planned an f10 shot for Saturday but elevated moisture levels in the ST7e camera stopped that. The dessicant cartridge needed recharging on saturday night and this meant placing it in an oven at 350F for 4 hours, so I took Saturday night off and went observing instead.
NGC2070 in Dorado. The final image of the week for me, or so I thought. The atmosphere on Friday night was somewhat swimmy and for those that know what a FWHM is, mine was bouncing from 4 to 5 which is quite terrible and made focusing almost impossible. This was pretty frustrating considering that it was another beautifully clear night. I monitored it for about 2 hours from 1am, taking over 100 images that were subsequently discarded due to severe star bloat and blur, then at about 3am Saturday morning it magically cleared. The FWHM dropped to less than 3, which is like a good night on the gold coast, but it was much darker. The image run was cut short after 90 minutes by twilight, and this is the result.
A great ending to a great week. The morning twilight looked magical every morning with Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and the thin crescent moon all nearby each other. Gemini is behind the moon and bright star on the upper right is Procyon in Canis Minor. Betelguese is also visible by extending a line from the Moon through Venus. This picture was taken Friday 17th at 5:50am using a Sony cybershot dsc-p1 digital camera riding piggyback on the 102mm refractor with the G11 mount tracking. It's a 2-second exposure in super nightshot mode.
Photos and Webpage by Eddie Trimarchi
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