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I finally found the time to setup the tripod and take a long exposure of the stars tonight. No moon, so a good time to do it. I set the D80 in manual mode, f/11, ISO 200, and opened the shutter for a bit over 10 minutes. The result is kind of weird.

The light blob in the lower left corner is the house over the road. The main image shows faint stars that are shifting around the south celestial pole (it’s slightly off to the right of this image. That all makes sense.

What I don’t understand are the purple/red blobs in the upper left and right corners. There was nothing in the night sky that I could pick that would cause these. There was no ambient light behind the camera (I had the house in almost complete darkness) and I had the eyepiece blackout piece fitted in place of the normal eyepiece.

The camera was in the front yard in pretty much total darkness. There was a teensy bit of ambient light from the faint glow the of town, but that’s all off to the left of this shot, and the weird blobs aren’t biased to the left in any way.

Any ideas?

Love this.

We heard this afternoon that Stephen Haintz passed away while on holiday. Stephen was the principal of St Augustine’s school up until the start of last year. He interviewed The Kid (along with us) and offered us a place in the school. He left before the start of last year to take up a post in Ballarat. His sudden death yesterday at the age of 46 was very sad news. We don’t know his family personally, but our thoughts are with them.