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| Frozen water in a birdbath. Keys to show the frozen layer. |
On the morning of 6th July 2008 Perth had it's coldes night for the 2008 year, reaching -2.5 at my location in the hills east of Perth. This might not seem like a very cold morning to many people who come from cooler climates, but for Perth this is quite cold. It's quite rare (about once or twice to four times a year) that it gets this cold. What comes with cold nights? clear nights! This one just happened to be near a new moon making it a great opportunity to capture some more astrophotography.
With the camera set to -25 degrees (C) and the peltier cooler only running at 65% power it was an easy task. The cooler the camera, the lower the amount of digital noise which is introduced into the resulting photographs.
Waking up in the morning the birdbath was frozen, ice was covering the exposed parts of the garden, and the observatory structure was completely frozen over, inside and out (dew forms on the inside of the tin walls & roof, and then freezes when the temperature gets below 1 degree ambient).
As far as the astro photo's go, my telescope imaged 73 objects in the night, which is near a record for my Project NGC. Unfortunately focus was out for one batch (6 objects) and some others are off-centre, so that 73 will likely drop to about 60 successful object captures. Better than nothing!
There are no results to show for the astrophotography of the night yet, as it will take the computer the next 3 hours to crunch over the image processing before I have results to show. Then I'll need to upload some.
Below are some more photographs from the morning.
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| Some leaves with ice covering them. I dont think this plant will be looking so healthy in a few days time. |
A cumquot with ice over the leaves and fruit. |
The birdbath pictured previously, frozen, with my observatory in the distance, the thin covered with a thin layer of ice. |
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