I wrote earlier about my astrophotography attempts with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II. Over the Christmas holidays, I had a couple of chances to use the SkyWatcher Star Adventurer. However, they were very short chances. It turns out that polar alignment in the southern hemisphere is rather difficult, even with a polar scope. It took me several nights before I found the right stars and achieved an acceptable alignment. And then, just as I could start taking well-aligned photos, the camera battery died. I usually have a backup battery charged — not this time. I had only managed one set of 10 and a few other test photos. But this is one of the tests:
This is a crop of an out-of-camera JPEG that shows the Carina Nebula taken from Canberra. It was a 50s exposure taken with a Nikkor-H 85mm f1.8 lens (vintage ftw). Click through to Flickr to see it properly – there’s no noticeable star trailing, and the increase in definition of the nebula compared to Deep Sky Stacker stacks of single-digit seconds exposures is quite satisfying. Obviously there are still several issues, particularly fringing and overal sharpness; I think my techniques in both cameracraft and photoshop are to blame there.
Unfortunately, it was fairly rainy for the rest of the holiday, so I didn’t get any more chances for astrophotography. C’est la vie.
