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I have decided that this season I'm going to try to focus on just a few targets and really collect a lot of subs on them, rather than going for quantity over quality of different targets. My second narrowband target of the year is this old favourite of mine, the wonderful Tarantula Nebula, which...

The forecast was for clear skies yesterday so I got my tripod set up in advance so that I could hit the ground running when darkness fell. Unfortunately it started out quite cloudy and I was all set to give up my plan, but at around 8:45pm it seemed to clear up enough to make my effort...

Last night I went to our new place (still unfinished) to take advantage of darker skies to shoot the comet C/2025 R3 Panstarrs one more time. It’s a bit higher than a few days ago but it’s still close enough to Orion to make for a nice tableau. I used my astro-mod Canon 600D, Rokinon 135 f/2 and...

When I was photographing the comet the other day I realised it had the potential to make a nice conjunction with the Orion Nebula and Rigel on Saturday night. The weather forecast kept changing, going from 10% cloudy to 90% cloudy in just 48 hours. Sure enough, as dusk settled in things were not...

A friend led me to realise that I could capture the comet with the tail in a better orientation if I removed the equatorial wedge from my Seestar and shot in alt-az mode, so I gave that a try last night. Much happier with the framing, but I had a hard time getting rid of star traces in my...

Oy oy oy, what a time I have had with this comet! I only realised it was visible a few nights ago, but it's in a tricky spot for me, with a combination of trees and power lines in the way. But last night I got about 20 minutes of 10-second shots of the thing with my Seestar S50 that I was *sure*...

The nights are just starting to get long enough to where it's worth trying to set up a shot in my New Zealand backyard. Last night I had the chance to shoot the Orion Nebula with my astro-modified Canon 600D and Rokinon 135mm lens on a Benro Polaris mount, so I took it. Only shot 100 frames, and...

I was as shocked as anyone that we had clear skies for last night's eclipse, since I cannot remember the last time we had a clear night since around November. But clear it was, and I had a great view of the eclipse from my front porch. I managed to see it from when the Earth's shadow first...

Every year, people come from all over NZ (and elsewhere) to photograph the sunflower fields that surround Oamaru. This year, to mark the 20th anniversary (I think) of their planting, the company behind them decided to hold an open day and let people come and experience the flowers in 360-degree...

I've lived in Oamaru, New Zealand, for 15 years, and have often driven through the village of Waikouaiti when going to Dunedin. In all that time, I never once ventured off the main road and so I had no idea that there was a hidden treasure just a few minutes' drive away. The Hawksbury Lagoon is...

Our town is famous as the blue penguin capital of the world (or at least New Zealand), but they are famously mostly viewable during evening and nighttime. During the day they tend to be out to sea feeding, so imagine my surprise when I was at the foreshore today playing with my new camera and...

I only learned of this comet's existence the other day (I think it was a surprise to the people who discovered it, too), and I wasn't sure I'd be able to shoot it since it's rumoured to be heading away from the sun and it's only visible for a short time after dusk. But today we had the right...

This morning we had a partial (76%) solar eclipse as dawn broke over New Zealand, so I was of course out there to try to capture it. I was stymied by a bit of cloud during parts of the event, but it was clear for much of it. I had three cameras going, two focused on the sun itself (see my post...

I was manically checking the weather forecast for this morning's eclipse on a regular basis over the past several days, and it was a rollercoaster of changing predictions, going from 0% cloud several days ago, to 100% cloud on Friday evening and then finally 5% cloud for the key two-hour window...

I was fortunate to have crystal-clear skies for this morning's lunar eclipse, but I was unfortunate that it was going to happen just before dawn. Nevertheless I headed out at 3am or so to my still-under-construction (but on pause) new house where there would be no obstacles to the west so I...

We have been enjoying several nights of clear skies the past week or so, so I've set my monochrome rig to photograph one of my favourite nebulae in the winter sky, the fighting dragons of Ara. I decided to try something a bit complex--I set my ASIAIR to shoot through broadband filters (RGB) at a...

I had never heard of this target before last night when Telescopius suggested it as a good target for my 8" SCT telescope. It's a challenging target, very small and with a lot of contrast, so I gave it all night (10 hours) and was happy that almost all my subs were usable. Celestron 8" EdgeHD...

I am so happy that I have got the whole wide-field thing down now, since there's a lot of cool areas to shoot with a modest lens. The other day I installed Magic Lantern on my Canon 600D, giving it focus peaking, a bulb timer and intervalometer, all very handy to have. I did not realise that it...

As promised in my earlier post, here is the second shot of the area around Crux, the Southern Cross, this time shot with my unmodified Canon R5 and a Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 lens at 70mm on a SkyWatcher StarAdventurer 2i. I bought the mount several years ago but have never actually used it...

Last night I did a little side-by-side comparison of the results of two wide-field astro rigs. My tried and true modified Canon 600D on a Benro Polaris with a nifty-fifty f/1.4 on the one hand, and a standard Canon R5 on a StarAdventurer 2i (that I’d never used before) with 70-200 f/2.8 lens at...