Purpurspanner (Lythria cruentaria)

My colleague picked me up in the afternoon to go to some field near a model plane airfield to look at the stars. This was a great chance to try out my star tracker. 

The drive through town was quite exciting. I put some more bits of Berlin together. It is quite astonishing how the big city turns into a thin belt of suburbia and then rural small towns and fields. I guess the area of Berlin is constricted as it is a city state within the federal state of Brandenburg. 

We got to the field in good time. My colleague set up his telescope (see extra) while I went for a bug hunt. The small butterfly of the blip was new to me as it doesn't occur on the British Isles. It was very peaceful except for a farmer with his tractor making hale bales. At least we saw a stork wandering behind the tractor catching what beasties there were to be caught. Eventually the farmer was done and we could enjoy the sound of the birds and crickets and the squawking of a flock of cranes passing overhead. We had a look at the sun with the telescope to see the sun spots which was quite amazing. As it got darker we heard the unpleasant noise of mosquitoes buzzing around us. They were joint by four rather large beetles which tried to land on us. No idea what they were as they didn't actually stop. 

Around midnight it was properly dark and we saw plenty of stars. Time to try out the tracker. The axis of the tracker needs to be aligned with the Earth's rotation axes, ie by looking for Polaris through the search scope. I think I managed to do that although using a ball head was quite tricky. I didn't take enough images for an interesting stack. I also tried the large lens but the tracker moved on the tripod plate so I lost the alignment. The tracker does come with a dovetail profile. Unfortunately, that doesn't fit on my clamps. I think I will need to get the polar wedge for the tracker which can hold the tracker without extra plate. It will also make aligning the tracker easier. On the plus side, the remote control of the camera using my phone worked really well.

We got home at 1.30. Although the astrophotography wasn't all that successful I immensely enjoyed my adventure. It was nice to be out of town, see some beasties and enjoy the transition from day to night. I have also learned some lessons for my next attempt at taking photos of the stars.

More pictures on flickr.