Hi,

Well I guess I should start this new site of with a bit of info about why I am doing all this.  I have been interested in astronomy since a young age, even to the point of studying units while at University.  During this period,  the posters on my wall were a mix of old rock bands and framed prints of Nebulae sourced from the Perth Observatory.  While I had the opportunity I tried my hand at astrophotography using the uni telescopes and an old film camera however there was limited support for this, unlike todays blogs and youtube feeds,  and so my attempts were poor to say the least :). .

After completing my time at Uni working life then took over, as it has a tendency to do.  Over time, with the various moves and relocation’s the framed prints were packed up and stored away.  While my interest in astronomy has remained, the combination of odd work hours, regular travel, no associates with a similar interest and, more recently a young family, has meant that I haven’t so much as looked through a telescope since those days 20+ years ago.  In the intervening years I have been fortunate enough to have lived and worked in a variety of countries and continents including Australia (original Home), Africa (Tanzania, Ghana) and Asia (Mongolia, Phillipines & Indonesia), with my home having been in Jakarta for the last 4 years.

I have had a dSLR camera (Canon 300D) for the last 10 years and recently updated it to the new Canon 70D.  At about the same time I saw an article on the Supermoon which occurred in August this year, with instructions on the settings to image the moon using a standard camera set-up, so I thought – “Why not ?” .

That first attempt to image the full moon ended up being a rushed hand held snapshot, with the 18-135mm lens already attached, due to trying to capitalise on a quick break in the cloud cover.  While not exactly a masterpiece, it was sufficient to get me hooked.

My next attempt with the full moon the following month (Sep) was an improvement as I had spent the time to do some more reading.  As there was no cloud cover that night I had the time to set up the tripod, change lens to the 75-300mm, hook up the remote shutter cable and take multiple shots with different exposures in the hope of getting a decent exposure somewhere in there.  Unfortunately, my tripod was as old as my old 300D so was woefully unsuited to the task and I had next to no knowledge of histograms..  The resulting image had minimal processing with just saturation adjustment and cropping in GIMP as I also have no experience with image processing.

The following month allowed me to rectify that lack of knowledge to some degree as my wife arranged a dSLR camera course for my birthday which opened my eyes to all sorts of features in the camera of which I was previously blissfully unaware – exposure compensation, bracketing and even HDR !  This, together with an upgrade in tripod and learning about being able to stack images, had me hanging out for the next full moon to try again, particularly as it was to be a Blood Moon in October.  Unfortunately the timezone in Jakarta meant that the eclipse was finishing just as the Moon was due to rise, however the heavy cloud cover prevented even that small opportunity.  It was a few days before there was a sufficient break in the cloud cover to be able to give imaging a go again.  This last attempt is 10 x 1/125 second images @ ISO100 stacked, curves and saturation adjusted in LightRoom.

With the reading and research I have been doing online in the last couple of months I have been amazed at the size of the amateur astronomy community and the quality of the images which are being produced and it has inspired me to continue and try to emulate some of the images I have seen.  Websites which have been particularly informative have been www.astropix.com and www.astrophotomag.com.  The cloudynights and iceinspace forums also have a wealth of information though it can be harder to find what you are looking for.

I am fairly happy with the progress so far and I can only assume that further practice will lead me in the right direction and I am keen to try imaging new targets.  Unfortunately, the combination of the light pollution and cloud cover over Jakarta the last week or so has severely restricted my activities in this area, however steps are being taken to remedy this. Last week an order was placed for a telescope and various attachments which is currently being shipped from Australia,  Then today I took delivery of a clip-in camera filter ordered from www.astronomik.com which, hopefully, will allow me to cut through some of the LP and play with some star trail shots while I wait for the telescope to arrive.  If only there was a filter for clouds and smog !

As mentioned earlier I have a young son who is just about to turn 5, and I am hoping that as he grows he will also be interested in what is up there in the night sky.  So far it is promising as once he heard that I was getting a telescope he has been wanting one, so I will probably buy him his own starter telescope for Christmas if the interest persists so that he can join me in exploring the evening sky.

I can already see that there is going to be a steep learning curve in pursuing this interest, so this website has been set up so that I can record my trials, frustration and, hopefully, successes as I move forward.  Maybe my experiences will assist someone else in avoiding some of the traps which I am sure to fall into.

There is already a list of challenges that I am going to have to work out including :

•  how do I navigate the night sky when I can’t see most of the stars ?  The idea of “night-glasses” using LP-filters in place of lenses has occurred to me but it is expensive, I guess that Go-To is going to be the solution but that then leads to the next problem…,
• how do I polar align the mount for the scope when it arrives when a) there is heavy LP (see point above), and b) Jakarta is at a latitude of 6 degrees south so the south pole is barely above the horizon, I am in an urban area surrounded by houses and there is a mountain range due south.  Which all combined means that the south celestial pole can’t be seen !

A bit of trial and error is obviously going to be called for.  Wish me luck !