Credit: Bill Stent The Southern Cross and Pointers. Credit: Mark Iscaro Large Magellanic Cloud. Credit: Bill Stent AstrophotographyĪ simple setup consisting of a colour camera and wide-angle (50 mm or more) lens on a camera tracker (for example the iOptron SkyTracker mount) can produce beautiful night sky photographs like Crux (the Southern Cross), the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Milky Way. Stent suggests something like a 5” Maksutov. These are a little fiddlier but will find and track objects for you. However, to see deep detail (such as the background stars in M7) you’ll need a camera to “grab and retain light, building those amazing images over time,” explains Stent.Ī more advanced observer (with deeper pockets) might consider a go-to mount. It uses a simple mount, but has great optics and will let you peer into galaxies and nebulae in the sky.Įxpect to have a more magnified view and see nebulae and detail in clusters like the Jewel Box and M7 (Ptolemy’s Cluster). If you can physically handle a bigger scope, Stent suggests something like the Saxon 8” Dobsonian (or even better, a 10” Dobsonian), for the best bang for your buck. Plus, it’s a ‘left-right, up-down’ (or altazimuth) mount which is the easiest type for first-timers.” It’s big enough to see the Moon, larger planets like Saturn and pretty star clusters like Omega Centauri, M25, M41 (Little Beehive), M47 and the Wishing Well Cluster. “Start with something half-way decent, like the Saxon 909Az3. Credit: Bill Stent The Wishing Well Cluster. You don’t need anything to gaze at the stars.” Bill Stentīut for those of us who didn’t have an astronomy club – or, let’s face it, just weren’t that interested back then – it can feel a bit overwhelming knowing where to start. “Listen, if you want to get into astronomy, you probably already are and didn’t know it yet. “We’d drag them onto the school oval at night, or make solar projections during the day.” “We had a 4-inch Unitron refractor in a dome, as well as an ancient brass refractor and a 6-inch Newtonian”, he recollects. For those gathered to see it – along the Pilbara coast and out on ships in the Indian Ocean, it will be a special, once-in-a-lifetime event – perhaps even one to spark a desire to see more.įor Bill Stent, an economist by training but now a key member of Australia’s only telescope factory, Sidereal Trading (which he reckons is ‘like working in the Ferrari factory’), his obsession with astronomy began with exposure to a club at school. The Apsolar eclipse will no doubt be much like every other. Wildlife and pets voice confusion as senses and circadian rhythms collide. The 20,000-strong crowd gathered in Ningaloo, a small town in Western Australia, fall quiet as the first shadowy arc crosses the Sun.
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