Following 2015 and 2016 that had many distractions with travel and POVG volunteering I had hopes of a renewed focus in 2017.

Aims for 2017 were to use New Moon dark sky opportunities at Perth Observatory or elsewhere to try some wide-field milky way shots as well as more faint nebulous objects.

I continued to have hopes, not progressed in the last 3 years, to try some mosaics and some HDR images in order to challenge me to improve my Photoshop skills and possibly even have a look at PixInsight, that is now an an entrenched Astrophotography software toolkit item. I did managed to experiment with EQMOSAIC for mosaic navigation and Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) early in the year. No HDR and a Pixinsight trial expired before I could trial it :(

I purchased an ED80 cheaply as an experiment in using one of these, particularly for solar use, though solar activity gave very limited opprtunity.

I continued my involvement with Perth Observatory's Volunteer Group (POVG) for Perth Observatory's public outreach programmes including coordinating the 4-person private 'star adoption' tours and involved in the Training of new volunteers with reference material and hands on training for equipment.

Unless stated otherwise, images are from my home location in Willetton, 12 Km south of the centre of Perth, Western Australia, though I used this far less now as it is unsuitable for faint objects using one-shot colour DSLR.

My favourite shots can also be found on AstroBin http://www.astrobin.com/users/scottastrophe