MIR IN MARCH 2001
Mir at 27,000 kilometres per hour The above photo of the now destroyed Russian MIR spacecraft, taken about 5 am in the morning of early March. I had been pursuing an acceptable photo of MIR for some months and this is the best result. The information on exactly where and when Mir would pass over was available from the Web site www.heavens-above.com. This information allows you to point your camera in exactly the right direction to capture the light trail of the satellite. The image captured is merely the sunlight bouncing off reflective parts of the spacecraft. I remember when it appeared in the low northwest, it was quite dull but soon became very bright as you can see in the image. The trees in the foreground add more interest to the photo and give it some perspective. The choice of lens was the 28mm wide angle to make sure that MIR would actually be in the photo. The exposure was approximately 30 seconds at the full aperture setting of f/2.8. ISO 400 was the choice of slide film and this was digitised with a slide scanner. The scanner I used introduced some "noise" into the image by giving the dark sky the pinkish hue that you see. In fact, the sky was really a deep blue, but this does not detract from the image that you see here. The light coloured vertical line in the middle of the image is an artefact of the scanning process, and yes, Mir was travelling at 27,000 kilometres per hour.

SUN SMOKE.
Sun Smoke This particular photo is one of my favourites and was captured with relatively little effort. The annual forestry burn-off in late March 2000 saw the western horizon in thick smoke. Seeing a photo opportunity, I quickly set the 200mm cassegrain 1800mm focal length telescope in the general direction of the setting sun. ISO400 slide film in the Olympus OM1 camera fixed to the back of the telescope at prime focus of f/9 using a Meade camera adaptor. Exposure on the camera preset to 1/500 of a second. The result is the colourful photo above. Also of note is the atmospheric distortion causing the disc of the sun to appear oval.

ORION NEBULA
Orion Nebula The constellation of Orion harbours one of the skies most fascinating and beautiful objects. The middle diffuse "star" in the handle of the "Pot" or "Saucepan" is the object pictured above. Commonly known as M42, the view through a telescope of this object is rewarding, but will not show its true colours unless photographed. It is a vast cloud of ionised hydrogen gas, illuminated by young hot stars in its central regions. To give you some idea of how far away and how big this object is, read on - light from our sun takes 8.2 minutes to reach our eyes, light from the Orion Nebula has taken 1300 to 1500 years to make it to our eyes. The distance across the nebula is about 30 light years, and within its depths, new stars are forming. ISO 1000 slide film and Olympus OM1 camera working at f/9 through the 200mm Vixen casssegrain 1800mm focal length telescope on an equatorial mount tracking at sidereal rate for twenty minutes. Mounted on top of the telescope is the guidescope operating at 150X on a bright guide star with an illuminated flashing reticle eyepiece.

OMEGA CENTAURI
Omega Centauri This is the largest and most massive globular cluster visible. Over one million suns reside here and it would take us 17,000 years for us to get there if we travelled at the speed of light. These distant suns appear like a blurry 4 th magnitude star to the naked eye, near the Southern Cross. To capture this on film, I used ISO 1000 film, Olympus camera attached to the 1800mm focal length 200mm cassegrain telescope at prime focus of f/9. Utilising a guidescope mounted on top of the telescope to track a guide star for a twenty-minute exposure. The view through the telescope eyepiece is nothing short of stunning, as the cluster of stars will fill the eyepiece field of view at low power.