Lachlan Wilson: Astrophotography Award

Lachlan Wilson, Year 11, has won the Junior Category of the David Malin Awards, which are the major astrophotography awards in Australia. Lachlan’s image is of objects in the outer reaches of the Carina Nebula. He explains that the photos he takes are primarily of deep space objects. This means that they are objects (nebulae and galaxies) outside of our solar system and often outside of our galaxy. None of the objects he photographs are easily seen with the naked eye.

Taking such photographs is not the work of a moment, as is evident from Lachlan’s description of the process:

I took the image over two nights in May and is the result of 123 separate images, stacked together in software to produce the final shot… One of the major pieces of my setup is a mount. The mount aligns to a point in the sky that appears to not rotate which allows me to track the movement of the sky and eliminate any movement in the images. I have a small astronomy camera attached to the end of a telescope. The telescope has an aperture of 90mm and is a mid-range astrophotography telescope.

Lachlan began his astrophotography journey after purchasing a telescope at the 2019 Radford Twilight Fete and initially photographing visible objects such as the Moon. Since then, he has upgraded all his equipment to be able to take deep space photos.

Lachlan’s award-winning photo will be exhibited for a year at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory's Visitors Centre and will also tour the country in a travelling exhibition, organised by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, beginning at the Sydney Observatory.

As previously reported in the Bulletin, on 31 August 2020, Lachlan, then in Year 9, was successful in the task of photographing the transit of the International Space Station (ISS) across the Moon, and event which lasted only 0.61s, and therefore involved complex data-gathering and planning to achieve the result.