Above: A beautiful young moon watched over us as we set up our equipment.

Above: Phil carries his telescope, used only for astrophotography, from the car to the tripod. Watch this movie in High Def at YouTube.

Click here to view a larger version of this panorama.

Above: A spherical panorama of our observing field, at the Leon Mow dark sky site, near Heathcote, owned by the Astronomical Society of Victoria (ASV). There were another dozen or so people observing on a different field, dedicated to telescopic observation, rather than astrophotography.

Above: For much of the night, Phil used my new 5D MkII on his telescope, as seen above, to photograph the comet and to test the capabilities of the camera. I was content to let him use it, as I’m very curious to know its astrophotography capabilities. First impressions from Phil is that it is a very capable astrophotography camera. I entertained myself by continuing to shoot with my 350D.

Above: Phil uses the 5D2 on his 530mm f3.3 telescope to photograph Comet Lulin, which can just be seen as a tiny green dot to the left of the bright blue Altair, above Phil’s hear near the top of the photo.

Above: Phil and I weren’t the only ones photographing the comet. Another ASV member is seen here controlling his telescope from an attached laptop. All of these photographs with foreground elements and the stars behind were captured in single exposures, and not composited. They were typically 30 second exposures at 18mm f3.5 and 1600ISO on the Canon 350D. It’s amazing how good a dark sky can look in camera.

Above: While the 5D2 was clicking away shooting an automated sequence, we visited the observation field, and were able to observe Comet Lulin through a gigantic pair of binoculars, 100mm (4in) in diameter. It was truly an incredible sight.

Above: I also turned my 350D to the iconic Southern Cross for a 30 second exposure with my 50m f1.8. The stars are incredibly dense and beautiful in this area of the sky.

Above: Once Phil had completed his tests with the 5D2, I was itching to get the fisheye lens onto the camera, to take advantage of the full frame and photograph the whole sky in a single shot. I did a sequence of almost 200 photos to create a time lapse, but for the photo above, I stacked 14 of the exposures together to minimise the noise and increase the brightness of the stars.

Night Sky Time Lapse by Fisheye.

Above is the full time lapse sequence built from the nearly 200 photos taken. Unfortunately the compression in the video at Vimeo doesn’t look great, but it’s better than the dreadful quality of the version at YouTube.

Click here to view a larger version of this panorama.

Above: Finally, I experimented with the all-sky photograph, as seen above, and turned it into an interactive panorama that you can click on and drag to look around the whole night sky. It’s really worth seeing this one bigger, so please click the link above. This has inspired me to try an photograph an all-sky panorama with my 50mm lens, and stitch all of the image together, to make a highly detailed interactive panorama of the night sky!