The Scruffy Astronomer

Australia's traditional owners had settlements throughout Western Victoria. Here, amongst all the other things they did, they observed and recorded their environment. This might have included sophisticated observations about the sky, including observations of variable stars. I'd not heard of Wurdi Youang before reading a newspaper article about it the other day. Observations of the sun? Wurdi Youang is near Little River, between Melbourne and Geelong. It's on open grassland which is on the western Victorian basalt plain, meaning there are loads of rocks strewn all over the place from the "relatively" recent volcanic eruptions of places like Tower Hill. You will have seen the sort of place we're talking if you've driven along the Hamilton Highway towards Warrnambool. Seriously, lots of rocks. Based on nearby artifacts, the site is likely to be over 10,000 years old. If it really were a solar observatory, and it certainly has that appearance, that would

My daughter Emma and I have just got back from a three-night hike around Wilson's Promontory. After the first night at Tidal River, we went to Little Waterloo Bay, walked through Refuge Cove and then camped the third night at Sealers Cove before returning to Tidal River. Emma is a scout leader and tough as nails, so she pretty much walked the legs off me. The birdlife at the Prom was pretty good, but I hadn't brought any optical equipment with me at all. This was quite frustrating, as I was hearing a bird at Little Waterloo Bay that I didn't quite recognise. You know that feeling you get when you just know you've heard the call before but you can't figure out what it is. It's horrible. Eventually I got a reasonable close-up look at one of them. It was a Crescent Honeyeater. Is it just me or do they associate with Beech trees? Other birds were good as well, if distant at times. We had Gannets feeding in Refuge Cove, a wary Bassian Thrush at the lunch spot t

One of the telescopes that we demonstrated at the recent open night was the 127mm saxon FCD100 triplet refractor. This is an astounding piece of equipment (people probably noticed me hogging it all night). I'd actually taken it home to do some testing on it previous to the open night. After all, I can't properly demonstrate something I haven't used, can I? One of my favourite test subjects was 47 Tucanae. It's bright and not hard to photograph, but it's complex enough to show up any problems with your equipment such as chromatic aberration (or coma if you're using a Newt). These photos were taken from my front yard in suburban Kew, so light pollution was always going to be a major problem. This is the image I got, without much processing. All I did was boost the whites (but not the highlights because I didn't want to overexpose the stars) and deepen the blacks (to get rid of the worst of the light pollution). It's fairly heavily cropped. To give you

We've just released a new video on our YouTube channel! Sky-Watcher Esprit triplet refractors are about as good a scope as you can get, without having to sell your house. Have you ever noticed odd colours around bright stars in your field of view? In particular, are you irritated by blue halos around these bright stars? Red fringes on the edges of the Moon? This is chromatic aberration. For astrophotographers, it's maddening. Esprits reduce chromatic aberration to nearly undetectable levels. "Triplet" type refractors do this by having three carefully designed and made elements in the objective group up the front end. This means that the colours can be focused sharply all at the same spot, eliminating all those false colours. Sky-Watcher Esprit scopes come with matched field flatteners, which improve your astrophotography further. Without a field flattener, if you focus on a star in the middle of the frame, the stars on the outside are slightly out of focus. In

A few people have asked me why I haven't posted content relating to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. It's a good question.   I remember watching telecasts of the moonwalks. We were all sitting cross-legged on the floor of a combined classroom, watching a huge black and white television on an impossibly tall trolley. We had a sense of history. I guess there are two main reasons why I'm not posting Apollo content. The first is that there is no shortage of posts, tweets, documentaries and news articles about it, so there's no real need. The second reason, which is probably more fundamental, is that I feel fairly ambivalent about the whole space program. Without a doubt, the whole space race demonstrated what an entire country (or two if you include the USSR) can achieve when properly motivated. The technological advances that came out of the various programs (not just the Apollo missions, of course) were huge. The whole purpose of the space race was

Well, at least it didn’t actually rain! We could have thought of better weather for the open night. The clouds had been with us all day, apart from a brief bit of blue late in the afternoon. By the time people began to arrive, the cloud layer had grown to the point where the Moon peeked through gaps every few minutes, but then disappeared again. However, the night was absolutely made by the fantastic people who showed up. Everyone was enthusiastic and engaged by the telescopes. It was really rewarding to hear so many questions coming from people who were so obviously interested in the hardware. We had a range of scopes, a couple of Dobsonians (an 8” and a 10”), a 127mm Maksutov, a Celestron CGX800 and a saxon 127mm triplet refractor. We also had a Celestron CPC925 available but sadly it didn’t get brought out before it clouded over. People also had fun with their own phones and a saxon ScopePix, taking photos through the scopes. Most people took photos of the Moon, but a few

We just came across this photo from Carol Moyse. It’s – for me, at least – one of the most iconic species of bird anywhere in the world. To call the Orange Bellied Parrot “critically endangered” is an understatement. A couple of years ago news came out that despite a big effort by wildlife expertsthere were only around 40 left in the wild. Since then there have been a couple of good-ish breeding seasons, meaning their numbers might be up a little. More recent news of a vaccine against Beak and Feather disease might help as well, but this is a bird that’s got the odds stacked against it. Their habit has been, up to now, to spend summer in Melaleuca, on the South West coast of Tasmania, and winter on the West coast of Victoria, sometimes spreading into South Australia. Strangely enough, the juveniles seem to take a different route to migrate from Tassie up to Victoria, and they’re not accompanied by the experienced adults. It just makes things harder for them. Of course, their bigg

Our mate Rob Watson sent in this photo that he took after reading our Facebook page on photographing Jupiter. Rob’s telescope is a Sky-Watcher 8 inch Newtonian, which was originally on a Dobsonian mount but is now on an EQ6 equatorial mount. The camera he used was a Sbvony SV205, and he took 45 second videos to avoid a lot of the motion blur you’d get from taking longer clips with Jupiter rotating so fast. Rob is a Mac user, which means a lot of the software he used was different to our description, as we’re Windows people. He captured the initial shots using Quicktime along with an app called Webcam Settings to tweak the exposure. He stacked the frames in Lynkeos, and then finished the image off using GIMP (which is the only app in this list I’m actually familiar with!). He’s very pleased with the result, and also confident he can improve on this. Some of the tips he suggests are: Shoot while the planet is higher in the sky (to minimise the amount of atmosphere the light has to go thr

Last weekend a mate and I went out to do the Winter survey for Birdlife Australia’s Birds on Farms project . This is a citizen science project, specifically targeted at seeing how birds interact with farms of all types, and how this might be changing over time. The farm is a few hundred acres of four or five randomly sown hardwood species. The trees are getting mature now, but are about the same age so there are no large “stags” in the forest. These provide nesting hollows for lots of different birds, as well as other animals. I understand this compromises the biodiversity of the forest. It’s also about 500 metres above sea level, and several hundred above the surrounding valleys. So, in Winter it gets cold, and not only do the seasonal migrants disappear, the altitude migrants do as well. And now we have evidence to prove it. There are four survey points on the farm. One is right at the top of the ridge, one is near the house with its large cleared area, one is on a creek and the last