Astro Photography Australia

For those interested in the September 5, 6, 7th Murchison Georegion Space Trail events next weekend, here's some info from Shire of Yalgoo. I can't wait for the excuse to get away from the city and travel up through the midwest again, especially being a good wildflower season.

Save the Date
Join the Murchison GeoRegion Space Trail and Brilliant Skies Adventure
Coming soon to Yalgoo, 5th September 2024

Free event plus a Light Dinner and Astronomy Presentation followed by Star Gazing will take place at Yalgoo Core Station from 5.30pm to 10.00pm.

Astrophotography Workshop with Roger Groom
15 Spots are available for the Astrophotography Workshop which will take place from 7.30pm to 9.30pm at Hyacinth’s Dominican Chapel on Henty Street. $50 per person to attend this workshop.

Contact Elisha on 0419 325 964 or email [email protected]

Tracks Astro Events
GeoRegion

Astrofest Astrophotography Exhibition entries close today, 18th August! Be it Under-15, Nightscape, Aurora, Solar, Planetary, Lunar, Deep Sky, AstroTourism WA towns, Timelapse video or Night Sky Friendly Lighting Photo! Get your photos in today!

Enter here: https://www.astronomywa.net.au/astrofest-astrophotograpahy-competition.html

Friday last week I was a guest on Light Minded podcast! I'm always shocked to be invited on such noteworthy publications 😆. After some encouragement from others I listened to the episode with me and hey, it's not so bad! haha. Chatting about camera gear with Saul, space weather with Jessica Lingard from the BOM, and me about Astrofest and astrophotography. Check it out on your usual podcast feeds, mine is Apple but I believe it's on Spotify and others.

‎International Award Winning Landscape Photographers Sir Peter Eastway, Tony Hewitt and Carwyn chat to some Lightminded Friend on Apple Podcasts ‎Arts · 2024

Get your timelapse videos in before 18th August to win a $300 voucher from Camera Electronic. UPDATE: the entry form now has instructions for sending videos over 100MB in size, so enter your 4k timelapse goodness! more info and entry form here: https://www.astronomywa.net.au/astrofest-astrophotograpahy-competition.html

A bit of fun with the crescent moon tonight. I should do some more high quality data sometime, as it's quite something to look in there at the details of the long shadows stretching across the moon, the endless craters with their rims just barely lit.

One set of data cropped twice. 2x500 frame videos, 25% frames kept. 2200mm focal length, ZWO1600mm luminance only.

In little over one month from now I'll be doing a road trip with a bunch of awesome astronomy colleagues through Yalgoo, Mt Magnet and Cue. I'll be running a workshop in Yalgoo, another in Mt Magnet, as well as a talk at Mt Magnet. Looking forward to it!

All WA photography enthusiasts not just astrophotographers, should consider entering the "Night Sky Friendly Lighting Photo" award in this year's Astrofest.

Share it to your camera club or group, $550 prize up for grabs!

This award in the 2024 Astrofest Astrophotography Exhibition showcases night sky friendly outdoor lighting though the exhibition of photographs that demonstrate responsible outdoor light at night.

Photographs entered into this category need not include night sky elements but may optionally. Entries should illustrate responsible lighting or emphasise an absence of light pollution and may include concepts such as:
- Buildings & Architecture lit responsibly at night
- Natural landmark sand attractions lit responsibly at night
- Events operated at night with responsible lighting
- Public parks and spaces lit responsibly at night
- Nightscape scenes that emphasise an absence of light pollution

More info: https://www.astronomywa.net.au/night-sky-friendly-lighting-award.html

Image: 25 second exposure of the Milky Way under dark skies with an absence of light pollution.

This year I am proud to be sponsoring an Under-15 award at the Astrofest Astrophotography Exhibition. The prize is a one-on-one workshop with myself. This would suit a budding astrophotographer well, maybe helping them get a jump start in different fields of astrophotography, or just enjoying a night of astrophotography under dark skies.

More information: https://www.astronomywa.net.au/astrofest-astrophotograpahy-competition.html
Entries here: https://www.icrar.org/astrophoto2024/

🎉... and just like that it's Astrofest 2024 Exhibition entry time! Entries now open: https://www.icrar.org/astrophoto2024/

There's a bunch of changes this year. Here's a few brief points:
- 5 max entries per person down from 10
- 4 weeks (almost) entry period
- 🏆new award: Best Under-15 Photo
- 🏆new award: Best Night Sky Friendly Lighting Photo
- Suzanne Jones has joined the judging team
- Re-organising of awards to consolidate them

There will not be an Astrofest in 2025, so, I'm going to be reinvigorating and pushing regional tours of this exhibition harder than usual in 2025. If you want your photo(s) travelling the state for two years, get onboard and let's show WA how awesome our night skies are!

There's of course a bunch of awesome prizes which we'll talk more about over the coming month. Follow at https://www.facebook.com/AstronomyWA to keep up with the posts. Also there is the event page at https://www.facebook.com/events/940008817878395

For all the exhibition information including our awesome sponsors (more posts to come re them!) check out the page at https://www.astronomywa.net.au/astrofest-astrophotograpahy-competition.html

Please share it around. Entries close 18th August 2024.

If you’re into photography and have the time today drop in to PhotoLive Expo 2024. So much going on there! 🤯👍 So many products and people to see, advice from the people who know their products well. I facilitated a workshop 9-11 which ended up sold out.+ extras and it was fantastic. Exhausted now!

Camera Electronic are offering 50% off the already good price on my PhotoLive Expo 2024 workshop "Delve into Nightscape Astrophotography" at 9am - 11am on Sunday. Use promo code "CEWS" for the discount. See you there!

Roger Groom - Photo Live Expo by Camera Electronic 21/07/24 – 09.00 -11.00 Roger Groom Astro Delve into Nightscapes Astrophotography Previous slide Next slide In this two-hour session delve into the details of capturing nightscapes. You can excel at this genre of astrophotography with your DSLR or Mirrorless camera. Nightscapes are a great introdu...

In September I'll be doing a road trip with a bunch of awesome astronomy colleagues through Yalgoo, Mt Magnet and Cue. This is a new expanded format of what has been the Mount Magnet Astro Rocks event in past years. It's going to be fun!

I have been notably absent from socials lately - overloaded with many things including dayjob and Astrofest Perth 2024 exhibition planning. You'll see more posts from me soon about Astrofest. Nevertheless, occasionally I pressed go recording data on my remote telescope and have been having great fun messing around with the absolutely ridiculous combination of my 2001 almost-vintage 12" Meade OTA (which is reduced to 2180mm using a Astrophysics focal reducer) and ZWO1600MM (the OTA was de-forked in 2012 to a Paramount ME). I put the ZWO on the 12" specifically for an occultation event, but it's kinda stuck! Using it bin2x2 is more usable than I imagined. In fact, I've been having great fun with this ridiculous combo, it reminds me of the days I was able to dedicate much more time to messing around with deep sky imaging and pushing pixel resolution to get the most from galaxies and planetary

This is Messier 16 which contains the "Pillars of Creation" as they've become known post-HST images. Some mediocre number of 2min exposures LRGB unguided. PixInsight & Photoshop. I chose to keep the colouring subtle. Not perfect but it'll do for now 😆

A big thank you to WA Museum Boola Bardip for having me on Saturday night to present a series of lunar photography workshops. We were completely clouded out but I enjoyed showing and talking about lunar photography, showing equipment we use for astrophotography, and talking about how mobile phones can be used for lunar photography. The participants saw lots of recent data from my many test runs during the weeks prior - videos and photos of the moon, including those fantastic halo's. Lots of good conversations were had with the audience.

It was the most logistically challenging workshop I have done. The constricted horizons available, calculating suitable dates for moon visibility, then considering that in context of what nights suitsed the WA Museum. On the night everything had to be brought on trolley from the State Library car park and as you can imagine with two astrophotography EQ setups plus presentation gear there was a lot to move!

A huge shout out to Astrotourism WA and Stargazers Club WA founder Carol Redford for volunteering her time to assist me. She was a great help and gave another dimension to the conversations, further enriching the experience for participants.

I've been loads of time lately preparing for a lunar photography workshop at the WA Museum this Saturday (sold out sorry). It's emphasis is on mobile phones. My stock of lunar photography had aged somewhat, and my equipment has changed over time, so there has been hours of equipment tweaking/swapping to ensure optimal throughput of customers. There's also been hours of image capture and photography, all in my backyard observatory. It's perhaps silly spending so much time on it, but I enjoy it and I want to put on the best show I can. It's pretty amazing what photos you can get with a mobile phone

If you missed out on this one, I regularly run lunar photography workshops at Perth Observatory . Though we don't have one booked just now, there will be more soon.

We've had a bit of high cloud around lately here and it's produced some nice moon halo's. This was last night at about 11pm, it was amazing! so distinct and clear.

What an epic night at Lake Leschenaultia - 100% kudos to the staff at the lake for "rolling with it" and having the gates open, being there to help people around the entry and parking, doing the best they can to manage what I think was more than 1000ppl and could have easily been more than 2000ppl. We were glad we arrived early with our fish & chips and got a parking spot!

My family and I loved seeing the aurora and the really "WOW!!" moment was the naked eye beams at 7:25-7:30ish. My 8yo loved photographing the aurora and it was great to see so many families and groups of friends enjoying this night sky event.

Aurora now in camera in twilight at lake leaschenaultia.

Crazy Aurora in the early hours of this morning! This photo is an automated "allsky" (though not quite!) shot from an observatory at my dark sky site. It's the most I could muster sorry!

To photograph the aurora australis from Perth/Western Australia see my info page on how-to here: https://www.rogergroom.com/astro-photography/aurora-australis-from-western-australia/photographing-aurora-australis-in-western-australia/

I knew the aurora was coming, but I was sleeping, after 2 weeks of hectic workshops not least of which was the last 3 nights consecutive with a 2am occultation, I just couldn't be out and about.

From Wilson Inlet at Denmark in the south-west of Western Australia here is another Milky Way photograph from our recent school holiday trip. Canon R6, Canon RF 15-35 F/2.8, a little foreground light and a little diffusion on the stars. Single 30 second exposure tracked.

Great to be supporting WA Astro Photographer Starbright Wonderland (Suzy) at her exhibition in Mandurah tonight. It’s not an easy or cheap thing to do, having an exhibition! Good to see astrophotography up on the walls for all the public to see.

Last night a private photography group was treated to an absolutely stunning night at my dark sky property: Sunset colours with cloud, crescent moonlight sparkling through light, clearing low level cloud, Orion setting as the Milky Way rose in the south-east under then beautifully clear sky. We then enjoyed some time at a telescope where the views of showpiece objects was absolutely stunning under the clear skies. Amazing.

Oh and watching the then orange crescent moon hang low over the zero degree altitude horizon as it slowly sank bit by bit until out of view. Always a highlight.

Canon R6, 20s @ 3200ISO, Canon RF 15-35 F/2.8

I was out and about again last night, this time in the Wilson Inlet at Denmark (Western Australia). There's many great locations along the inlet foreshore but it can take many days, in fact many trips to Denmark, before the clouds cooperate and coincide with availability!

There were clouds passing through intermittently all evening, must have been very low, so it was impossible to get a evenly clear and flat night sky at any one time. Also light pollution from nearby Denmark and more distant sources, all combine to make the sky a bit patchy.

Fascinating how fish were jumping out of the water, catching bugs it seemed. Particularly when I shone my headtorch across the water. Lots of other interesting natural sounds out on the inlet too. It was particularly calm, allowing me to hear far and wide across the inlet.

This photograph is using the with Canon RF 15-35 F/2.8, on the V***n Polarie, on the tripod with a remote trigger.

Outdoor Explorer reached out to myself and fellow astrophotographer Colin Legg recently regarding Aurora Australis. Here's a link to their article. :)

Beam me up, Scotty 👽 🛸
Good news: it turns out you can see beautiful beams of light cascading down from the infinite darkness without being in mortal peril from an impending alien invasion!
Read more about the out-of-this-world beauty of the aurora australis here: https://buff.ly/4cKjiTF 🗺️ 🎇
📸: Aurora australis captured at Norring Lake near WaColin Legg Photographyraphy.

Standing at the beach of Greens Pools, Denmark WA. Canon R6, Canon 15-35 F/2.8 lens. Towards the end of astronomical twilight so I expect some light on the horizon is from late twilight.

A little processing in lightroom but trying to not overcook it. In hindsight I wish that I'd done a few things differently with this shot - I'd like to have tracked exposures of the stars, and I'd like to have done some diffusing of the stars to make Orion more prominent. Anyhow, is what it is!

I like the somewhat natural feel to it, and for a self portrait I don't mind it, not something I do too often. I prefer not to artificially light such scenes.

Next dark sky workshop, on 4th May:
https://events.humanitix.com/nightscapes-workshop-central-wheatbelt-may-2024

School holiday family trip down south and I went out for some astrophotography last night at William Bay. Photographing with and Canon 15-35 F/2.8 on Leofoto tripod with V***n Polarie tracker. Photograph taken with my Fuji X-E2 and Samyang 12mm on Leofoto MT-03.

The Canon R6 + 15-35 F/2.8 were making easy work of nightscapes, more from that combo later. So easy to focus and so much data in short exposures.

The wind was probably the most challenging aspect of the night - drifts of sand blown in my eyes without warning. I almost needed goggles and I wasn't swimming! I guess the gear could've done with a good clean/sandblast 😉

My next nightscapes dark sky workshop: https://events.humanitix.com/nightscapes-workshop-central-wheatbelt-may-2024

Ask and you shall receive, Barry Cowley . The moon, taken 30mins ago tonight! Single exposure using Canon R6 @ ~1400mm focal length. Now, there is something special about this photo of the moon, very special indeed. It has to do with the telescope it was taken on, but I'll leave you hanging on that until I've given it a little clean and got connections sussed, so it's ready for being seen in public in the coming days. This shooting of the Moon was the first time I have had the absolute pleasure of using this telescope since the early 2000's.

PS. there will be -no- moon on the 4th May at my next Milky Way dark sky workshop 😉 https://events.humanitix.com/nightscapes-workshop-central-wheatbelt-may-2024

It's a great time of year in the - temps have cooled down, atmosphere is clear, very little cloud (as usual). I'm looking forward to getting some more pics once the moon goes away. My autumn nightscapes workshop is on May 4th: https://events.humanitix.com/nightscapes-workshop-central-wheatbelt-may-2024

Canon 6D, Tamron 15-30 F/2.8 @ 15, 10x60s, ISO 2000. August 2019. Stumbled upon this one in my backlog of images.

Checkout this for something different - Saturday 24th the Perth Observatory welcomed the Hills Symphony Orchestra to the site for an awesome concert under the stars! It is just the mix of events and astronomy I love. The weather was a little difficult with cloud and spots of light rain beforehand, but good enough to enjoy something unique and lots of fantastic music.

I've been a volunteer at the Perth Observatory for about 15 years and it's great to see the volunteer run organisation continuing to push the boundaries and expand how the public can become involved and enjoy the observatory.

A fun evening at Shire of Mundaring Libraries last night chatting about using your DSLR/mirrorless camera for astrophotography, absolutely loved it. A great turnout of about 50 people.

I've been a little quiet on the socials, just busy with general life - dayjob, lots of telescope maintenance, running workshops (but not getting to take pics of the workshops for posting on social media!) The usual! 😆

I've just posted a bunch of new workshops - check them out at https://www.astrophotography.com.au/astrophotography-workshops-upcoming.html