2024 was a good AP year! It included eight nights in dark Colorado or New Mexico skies spread across four Beast trips, six nights of glorious Southern Hemisphere skies at San Pedro de Atacama, Chile’s Atacama Lodge, and a total solar eclipse viewed and imaged from San Saba, Texas. As I was tidying up my 2024 astrophotography journal, creating the Year in Review summary that I always put at the front of that (even more verbose than these blogs (444 pages!)) document, I thought it might make a good blog, so here it is!
Dark Skies Trip to Kick Off the New Year
After spending the 2023 holiday season experimenting with stacking and processing old data due to a dearth of clear dark skies opportunities throughout 2023, 2024 started out with a one-night desperation dark skies trip to Kiowa National Grasslands. The number of dark skies nights I’d had in 2023 (four, yes 4!) had me so anxious (perhaps a bit irrational) that I was willing to have us make the drive and set up all the equipment knowing that there was only going to be a single night of imaging. Paul agreed (he really is VERY supportive!) and we drove to Mills Canyon. Deterred by the snow on the road to go all the way to our normal spot by the rim of Mills Canyon, we set up at the Mills Canyon Rim campground. I set up Big Bertha only (because it was going to be windy and I didn’t feel like I had a secure enough setup for the Southern Cross) and successfully captured my end-of-2023 obsession target: IC443 Jellyfish Nebula. The blog with the full description of that trip is: https://beersastrophotography.com/recent-adventures/finally-a-night-in-the-beast-in-dark-skies/
The image captured that night is in the gallery post for Jellyfish (https://beersastrophotography.com/gallery/ic443-jellyfish-nebula/ ), in the other images section titled: “Dark skies image from Kiowa National Grasslands”
A Most Amazing Trip to the Atacama Desert
The first BIG event of 2024 was my first trip to Chile to image from San Pedro de Atacama. It was the most amazing trip, in all respects! The travel, with Danita, was great. All the equipment arrived safely, with us, and in one piece (although there was a slight encounter with a Customs agent on the way back through Houston). We had six nights of dark, clear skies – something I have never experienced! I ran out of preplanned targets, never daring to imagine that I would be able to image every night of the trip! The blog with the full story of our travels and imaging is at: https://beersastrophotography.com/recent-adventures/the-most-amazing-astrophotography-trip-to-the-atacama-desert/
The collages below are my favorite images. I won 1st prize in the Astronomical League’s Williamina Fleming Imaging Award competition for NGC6188 Rim Nebula (a.k.a. The Fighting Dragons of Ara). BTW, while I was putting together this summary, I realized that I should put all the images from that trip in a single gallery. So, I did just that! It’s at: https://beersastrophotography.com/gallery/southern-hemisphere-march-2024/
Less than a month later – Total Solar Eclipse
The second BIG event of 2024 was our trip with Jan & Dave (with a fringe benefit that Stephanie was attending training at Goodfellow AFB and it was a couple weeks before she was going to pin on Captain – so we also had a pin-on ceremony!). We did our recon the day before the eclipse and changed our imaging plan location from the Llano Municipal Airport to the cute little town of San Saba, Texas. We set up in San Saba’s Mill Pond Park to witness (and capture with three separate imaging rigs) the amazing sight of a total solar eclipse.
The blog is at: https://beersastrophotography.com/recent-adventures/total-solar-eclipse-san-saba-texas-8-april-2024/
The images are in the Solar Eclipses gallery at: https://beersastrophotography.com/gallery/total-solar-eclipse-8-april-2024/
New & Misbehaving Equipment
While I was in Chile, I had issues with the Rainbow Astro RST-135E recognizing that it was truly in the Southern Hemisphere. Throughout the trip, it continued to insist on parking facing east, instead of west. When I decided it didn’t really matter and tried to start a sequence from that eastern-facing home position, I realized that it DID matter! After that, I manually rotated the mount to the proper position at the end of each night. I struggled with the mount’s strange behavior through our trip to the eclipse and during imaging from the front patio in May. In mid-June I finally gave up and called Tolga – it turned out that the GPS within the RST-135E’s hand controller was malfunctioning and needed to be replaced. The blog that describes that debacle and its final resolution is: https://beersastrophotography.com/photography-journals/the-final-errant-piece-of-the-southern-cross-equipment-falls-into-place/
I’d gotten the ZWO EAF auto-focuser in 2023. I learned about the miracles of digital printing from Ann Chavtur and Jay Miller during the CSASTRO Christmas party, found a design, and printed it at the PPLD over the 2023 holidays. (https://beersastrophotography.com/ap-equipment/the-miracle-of-3d-printing/ ) Shortly after that, I’d struck up a conversation / friendship with MikeinWI (through Thingiverse) who designed the digital print I used for Big Bertha’s EAF collar. I reached out to him to see if had a design for a 10” R-C. He didn’t, but he made one for me (and even printed and mailed me test prints) – so Big Zeus got an EAF attachment collar too! Later in the year, in an email, Mike mentioned that he’d gotten a Rack & Pinion (R&P) focuser that seemed to perform better than the friction-based Crayford focuser that comes with the R-C telescopes. So, of course, I NEEDED one! That launched me into a couple of months of EAF – R&P (and all telescopes’ focusers) experimentation. Which concluded in mid-September, when I actually read the SGP instructions for figuring out the correct step size for the EAF routine. That blog is at: https://beersastrophotography.com/photography-journals/exercising-and-experimenting-with-the-focuser-and-auto-focuser/
Lastly, on the equipment front, December was filled with the frustration of DSO-CTRL2 (the HP ProBook controlling Big Bertha) randomly shutting down throughout an imaging sequence. Rather than (again) raising my blood pressure, I’ll point to the blog that was that story, here: https://beersastrophotography.com/photography-journals/thanksgiving-plan-b-and-decembers-month-long-laptop-struggles/ Spoiler alert: the laptop wasn’t too cold, I’d “overdressed it” and it was overheating. It took the addition of DSO-CTRL3 to the BeersAP equipment family to learn that, what I’m calling my $929 lesson.
Three dark skies adventures
The second half of 2024 graced us with three opportunities for dark skies trips, seven nights in total, each to a different location. Over the 4th of July weekend, we traveled to the Powderhorn, Colorado area and ended up camping on the BLM land very near (probably within 200 feet) our 2023 camping spot. I set up both Big Bertha and the Southern Cross, managing to capture data on seven DSO’s, including several I’d never imaged before! The blog, including those images, for that trip is: https://beersastrophotography.com/photography-journals/powderhorn-july-4th-dark-clear-skies/
In October, we were trying to decide between Kiowa and Comanche National Grasslands – Mother Nature decided for us, with more clear nights at Comanche. We headed for our favorite spot – Wisdom Tooth Arch only to find that it was blocked off to vehicular traffic. The unfriendly Ranger that we ran into after discovering that, didn’t have any idea why. We’re assuming it was because of that challenging ravine on the way into the area, that we could get through with the Beast, but might have gotten more challenging with additional erosion. We headed up to south and east (toward the Oklahoma state line!) and found ourselves at a spot we are calling Camel Rock, that turned out to be very close to the point where we had our first camping trip in the Beast in December 2019! The blog from that trip is: https://beersastrophotography.com/photography-journals/october-dark-skies-adventure-23-targets/
I again set up both rigs (BB & SC) and captured eight targets over the two nights that we were there! The collages below show the four images captured with each rig.
Finally, a New Years Eve dark skies trip (two nights) to the Mills Canyon Rim, Kiowa National Grasslands put a bow on the astrophotography year! The winds were forecast to be crazy, so we camped at a spot a little bit away from our normal rim spot “in the trees” (about 200 yards from our normal spot close to the rim). This trip was “first light” with DSO-CTRL 3 whose set-up proved successful (and provided the $929 lesson with its overheating message when I powered it back up from its unplanned shut-down on the first night of imaging). The blog from that trip describes the few computer start-up differences/glitches and the five DSO’s captured (six images total because I captured NGC2264 Cone Nebula with both BB and SC) is: https://beersastrophotography.com/photography-journals/new-years-eve-dark-skies/
Summary of the summary
2024 was a good AP year! It included eight nights in dark Colorado or New Mexico skies spread across four Beast trips, six nights of glorious Southern Hemisphere skies at San Pedro de Atacama, Chile’s Atacama Lodge, and a total solar eclipse from San Saba, Texas.
It was such a great imaging year… First, in the summer I won First Place Deep Sky in the Astronomical League’s Williamina Fleming Imaging Award competition. Then in early January 2025, when I was submitting ten images to the Royal Greenwich Museum’s astrophotography competition, I had to have a “chose your favorite 10 out of my 20 favorites” party with Danielle and Dave!