This past December I had the opportunity to visit Australia with my wife. One of the highlights of our trip was a four day camping excursion in the Australian Outback. This was my first opportunity to experience the skies of the Southern Hemisphere and the Outback did not disappoint. We had three nights of perfectly cloudless Bortle 1 skies.

Given that we were traveling between four cities and had to pack both business attire and camping clothes, I was limited on the astrophotography gear that I could bring. I ended up with minimum I felt I could get away with:
- An Olympus OMD EM1 III
- Olympus 17mm f/1.2 lens
- Joby tripod (12" tall flexible tripod with a sturdy attachment)
- Superzoom lens for general travel photography

Each of the three presented images represent a stack of 20 x 15 sec sub-exposures. I also took 20 darks for each session as well as one set of sky flats for calibration. I stacked the images using Sequator as it has a nifty feature for separating the sky from the ground and only doing star alignment on the sky part. All post processing was done in PixInsight.

The three images presented were taken from the Uluru campground and the MacDonnell West campground.

The "final" version above features the Large Magellanic Cloud and Milky Way taken from the MacDonnell West Campground. This was my favorite of the three combining both the Southern Milky Way with the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Eta Carinae nebula is visible as the large red/pink patch in the upper left of the image in the center of the Milky Way. The Lambda Centauri Cluster, also know as the Running Chicken nebula, is visible between Eta Carinae and the large dark nebula in the center of the Milky Way at the bottom of the image. Right above and to the left of dark nebula is the constellation Crux, also know as the Southern Cross, made from the four bright stars in a cross shape. This was taken around 10PM.