[Leica] Astronomical images from Australia

[Howard L Ritter Jr]

Thanks, Peter! I want to go back myself.

The tripod shots were 15-30 seconds, about all that can be managed without objectionable star trailing with the 14-24mm FLs that I used for them. The “closeup” (!) of the Large Magellanic Cloud was made at 85mm for 180 sec with the camera on the tracking device.

—howard


> On May 17, 2017, at 7:33 AM, Peter Dzwig <pdzwig at summaventures.com> wrote:
> 
> Glorious shots. Brilliant. I want to go too! What were the exposure lengths?
> 
> Peter
> 
> On 10/05/2017 18:12, Howard L Ritter Jr wrote:
>> G’day, Mates—
>> 
>> I finally fulfilled an ambition of over 50 years and visited Australia, actually my first venture south of the equator. I attended something called the OzSky Star Safari <http://ozsky.org/> at a place called the Warrumbungles Mountain Motel outside the town of Coonabarabran, NSW, about 5 hrs NW of Sydney. It’s so far out in deep rural Oz that it’s only a few miles from the Australian National Observatory at Siding Spring, on the edge of Warrumbungle National Park.
>> 
>> My first view of the southern Milky Way from a seriously dark site was astounding, and I highly recommend it as a bucket-list item! As a neophyte astrophotographer, I had taken a Nikon D810A (the one with the sensor glass that better passes deep red) and a couple of zooms. I used the camera on a tripod for the shorter time exposures, and with a tracking device that offsets the Earth’s rotation for the longer shots. I got several nice ones, posted to the Gallery <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/Gallery_001/>.
>> 
>> C&C&Q welcomed.
>> 
>> —howard
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> 
> ===========================================================
> Dr Peter Dzwig				
> 
> 
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