After a busy 2012/13 Christmas and New Year holiday period and restart of work along with the formal announcement of the 'End of Research' at Perth Observatory where I volunteer for public outreach, I struggled to find time to get back to my OAG experimentation started in late 2012 and to start working through objects of interest in my third year of DSLR AP.

I had also bought a GSO 2" 1.1x Coma Corrector and did a test of this on 28/1/2013 to find its best back focus distance was ~70mm, but that it does not perform as well as the Baader MPCC that I have been using since May 2012. It's one advantage is the extra 15mm back focus allows for the addition of a low profile OAG or filter changer into the optical train.

Having been using BackyardEOS (BYE) for most of 2012, initially with a Canon 400D which does not have Live View mode, my addition of a Canon 40D in the second half of 2012 enabled the Planetary mode of BYE but I had not experimented with it. I did some initial trials with this in late February 2013 and with Registax 6 to post process the AVI video files created. A longer focal length than I can achieve with a 2X Televue PowerMate is needed for the major planets with my 480mm and borrowed 800mm telescopes, so I put a 4X PowerMate on my wish list and added one to my collection in late April and first tested 26th April on Saturn and the Moon. Focus at the longer focal length and keeping it in focus is quite a challenge!

Another aim for the year was to try some piggy-back wide-field with my standard 18-55mm DSLR lens on my 400D and 40D as I'd pretty much neglected this apart from a few star trails and movement sequences to date. I first gave this try 1st June 2013, discovering the field flatness limitation of the lens and more successfully for star trails 21/6/2013. Also the low ISO of the 400D (max 1600) and 40D (max 3200) makes quite a difference compared to recent models that have 6400+. I did further attempts in October and end of November on a dark skies field trip.

My deep sky object plans for the year were to pick up a few missed Messier and Caldwell objects and revisit a few interesting ones from initial captures, as well as the interesting, but mostly faint dark-sky, Gum catalogue objects in the southern Milky Way body. Alas, most of the Gum objects are quite faint and true dark skies are required. I didn't find enough time with suitable weather to get many of these retried.

Both the wide field DSLR and faint nebulae deep-sky experiences gave me resolve to upgrade my DSLR to a current generation Astrophotography modified version and after some research ordered a Canon 70D in early December and will be a 2014 task to come to grips with it.

Unless stated otherwise, images are from my home location in Willetton, 12 Km south of the centre of Perth, Western Australia.

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

Not on my plan for the year, but talked into by a general photography friend http://kimbomac.smugmug.com/, was a 31-day Worth 1000 challenge for October, the challenge being a new photo per day for the month. With 10 days of cloud and several others that looked like they might go that way, this was a real challenge. Images for this can most easily be found here http://scottastrophe.smugmug.com/Astronomy/Competition/Worth-1000-October-2013-31-Day