my first ever astro pics

The last time we went to the Magellan Observatory at Lake Bathurst (about an hour north of Canberra) was two years ago and was the subject of my first ever notblog. It snowed on us then and we swore we would return to stargaze in a warmer season. We didn't. We spent last friday night swinging through the southern skies with a 24 inch f3.7 truss dob newt. Jupiter was straight up, both red spots were easily visible, and Io entered occultation then later exited Jupiter's shadowing eclipse. Andrew froze solid after two hours and Lachy shortly after even though he had climbed up and down the step ladder to reach the eyepiece about a hundred times. So they bailed out and I followed sometime around midnight. Sat nite was a little milder (i.e. above zero) and Jen, Keryn and Taffy were given a sky tour by Zane on the 24" whilst I learnt my way around a 10" photo rig newt on a german eq mount . It had a modded dig slr on it which worked well with exposures of 2-3 minutes for messier objects, and needed sub second exposures for jupiter.

M8 (Lagoon Nebula), M20 (Trifid Nebula) and M104 (Sombrero Galaxy)

Sunday night Zane left me to my own mischief as I alternated between the photo rig and a 12" SCT. Both had GPS GoTo systems with surprisingly intuitive controls. After a short time I found it quite quick to skip around through dark neb, planetary neb, messier, IC, NGC, and cluster catalogs. I got about thirty pics of objects from my wish list before the clouds closed in about 2300. I kept forgetting to put my gloves back on and lost feeling completely in my fingers several times. Half a dozen pints of vitamin G helped. or maybe hindered.