Starry starry night

The last few nights have been wet and overcast here in Sydney, but the previous few dozen were totally clear-sky astro-friendly ones. Here's a shot I took of the Milky Way's inner suburbs, a couple of weeks ago.

I'm still in awe of the picture quality I get from my mobile phone.

Photography made (too?) easy!

I got bored with my super-cheap bottom-of-the range smartphone the other day. The camera was never much good, and it was so slow that if I wanted assistance from Google Maps, I was usually at my destination before the app finally opened.

Hence the upgrade. Not my usual half-hearted minimalist upgrade, but an upgrade to a top-of-the range super-camera, attached to a supercomputer, with a phone tacked on as a bonus too.

I tested it out on a morning stroll around the suburb, pointing-and-shooting here and there. And what do you know! Whatever you shoot, it enhances, optimises, fixes up perfectly.

Most amazing of all, you can even point-and-shoot at the night sky. No need for tripod, cable release, long exposure, special lenses. Nothing. I just held it up, pointed it at the Milky Way, and pressed the button. This is what eventuated!


Here's Mount Victoria station the other day. A difficult shot, because the big shady awning was making the station and platform extremely dark, while the sunshine outside was bright. The auto-mode camera didn't blink an eye, so to speak.

And as for the super-macro lens, in use below, what can I say? This phone has four separate cameras in fact, and it automatically switches between them as required!

The emu in the sky

We've had some very nice clear sky nights recently, so I took the opportunity to get out and photograph the emu. This is the Aboriginal constellation formed out of the dark patches in the Milky Way.

The emu head is the Coalsack - right next to the Southern Cross. The body stretches down from that, a fair way across the sky.

The Guringai people carved an engraving of this on a rock platform in the now Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. When the emu in the sky lined up with the one on the rock, it was time to harvest emu eggs.




Our own traditional astronomy makes its constellations by drawing lines between stars. Here are the Cross, the Pointers, and Scorpius.



Below: a visitor posing in front of the Ku-ring-gai Chase engraving.



There's a nice little video on the emu in the sky, as understood by the Kamilaroi people, courtesy of the NSW Government. Go to this link and click on the video link.
http://lrrpublic.cli.det.nsw.edu.au/lrrSecure/Sites/LRRView/14145/14145_02.htm

Kanangra skies

I spent the Easter long weekend in the Kanangra-Boyd National Park, doing an unexpectedly gruelling (but ultimately satisfying) 3-day bushwalk. More on that in subsequent posts, but here are some night sky shots from the Boyd River camping area.

We amazingly had an Easter of excellent weather, both bushwalking-wise, and astronomy-wise. And with reports of a possible nuclear winter to come, it was very much time to put my wide
angle lens to good use on the clear dark sky.

An exposure of a few seconds (first picture) yields the brighter stars (Southern Cross, Pointers etc) plus a hint of Milky Way. Click on the picture to see it a bit better.

Give it a full minute, and enhance it a little, and we get a very bright Milky Way indeed, though you have to work a little to distinguish that Cross. You see the Coalsack dark nebula well. It's otherwise known as the head of the Emu constellation - the enormous dark-patch constellation of indigenous astronomy. More of that in a few weeks time hopefully, when it's fully visible, nuclear winters permitting.







Here are my fellow campers, enjoying a nice warm campfire.