From Orion to Ophiuchus in the world's newest Dark Sky Park (Brian Boyle)

Contains: Extremely wide field

From Orion to Ophiuchus in the world's newest Dark Sky Park

Delighted to let my AB friends know that my local area - the Kawarau Gibbston (NZ) - has been today certified as the world's newest international Dark Sky Park. Its been quite a bit of work building and writing the application, but I am delighted we have been successful.

To celebrate, I thought I would post a new image of the night sky from my observatory - now located at the centre of the Park. This is designed to support the ABC survey, but also shows how dark our sky is. The mosaic was sub-optimally stitched from pre-stretched frames in PTGui (because PI and APP simply cant handle this) and no attempt has been made to further process the data [other that resampling 4x4 to fit is into this post].

The images are each 1hour with a Sigma Art 40mm lens wide-open and were taken over the course of the last two nights. I have even more images around the edge, but I am struggling to include them, due to my limited mosaicing skills. The image is not meant to be the final work, but rather to accompany the news of our new Park.

It has been the support and encouragement received from my AB friends that has encouraged me to pursue my AP hobby in my "retirement". In many respects, this has directly led to today's success.

This is my (small) way of saying "Thank you".

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From Orion to Ophiuchus in the world's newest Dark Sky Park

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From Orion to Ophiuchus in the world's newest Dark Sky Park

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