Strange Quarks

I took this image of Comet McNaught from the front of my house on January 23 2007 at about 9:30pm after just having returned from several days in Arkaroola (700 km NE of Adelaide). The orange hue is caused by a streetlight near my house. You can see the striations in the comet’s tail, material left behind as the comet passes through its orbit, away from the Sun. I used a Pentax K100D at ISO 800 for 30 seconds at f 4.5. Some star trailing is evident due to the length of the exposure. After some processing, I’ll also probably post images of the comet I took in Arkaroola.

Here’s a picture that shows the region surrounding the Arkaroola village, along with the village itself. Left of centre you can just spot the white speck of one of the observatory domes, just near the base of a hill that I and a few others spent an hour or so carefully ascending. There’s nothing much else around for many kilometres, but plenty of nature.

Our group was stuck in Arkaroola an extra day due to heavy rains while we were there. Apparently decent rains in that region only occur on average once in 8 years. In any case, it gave us a further chance to explore more of this beautiful part of the Flinders Ranges. It’s a place I’ll want to go back to again.

This entry was posted on February 4, 2007 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Astronomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.