Sunday June 30th 29th in the Flint Hills, photo above looking SSW as the sun was setting. Photon Phil and I both arrived early from opposite directions. Guess we were pretty excited to have a potentially good night. And the night sky turned out to be excellent. Consistently good transparency all night (as predicted) with virtually no wind. The temperature was steady around 65 F with dry air, unusual for this time of year. Possibly the best night at our site in many, many months.
I collected many good exposures that resulted in my best effort yet on the Rho Ophiuchus / Antares region. This area is a fantastic combination of emission and reflection nebula. The image to the right is the composite of the best 28 exposures using a Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens (EF, non USM) wide open. Click the image or here to view a larger sized image.
The next Monday night, last night of June was also pretty good. Between the two days I have several hours of exposures of M17 to process. Hope to get that posted in the next week or so. I also collected over 540 images for a star trail and/or time lapse movie. This was an experiment to test a few new ideas for use later. I can confirmed that a 16gb card (Sandisk Extreme III) does work in a Canon 20D. Note that the 20D will not correctly format the card so I used a Canon 40D for that.
Summertime and the livin’s easy
Bradley’s on the microphone with Ras-MG