Barden Ridge Observatory Home

Barden Ridge observatory (BRO) located around 30km to the south of the Sydney central business district.
The observatory is privately owned, sorry, no tours.
The nearest public observatory is located at
Green Point which is operated by the Sutherland Astronomical Society

BRO sits at the top of the Woronora River valley, with the Royal National Park to the east.
Holsworthy Reserve and Heathcote National parks to the south.

Below is Comet comet C/2023 A3, Tsuchinshan-ATLAS
a recent visitor to the inner solar system.

It passed closest to the Sun on September 27th 2024
and for a short time became the brightest comet to grace
Earthly skies in 27 years. It's bright display was sadly short lived.

Image taken from Wentworth Falls, NSW Australia
on October 20th 2024 at which time its brightness had faded significantly.

"The orbital period of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS was calculated to be more than 80,000 years,
however, as it travel through the Solar System, gravitational interactions with other objects can alter the orbit.
The most current calculations from NASA's Solar System Dynamics (SSD) group show
that it is on a hyperbolic path, meaning that it will not return. Either way, it is a once-in-a-lifetime event"

Royal Greenwich Observatory
Astronomy Photographer of the year 2024
Runner-up image "Our Sun" category

Viewed during a total solar eclipse, the solar corona has a remarkably different appearance during solar maximum compared to that seen at solar minimum.
Suffice to say, several years had to pass before the second dataset capture
and travel to extremely remote locations in different continents and hemispheres was required.

"The lower half of the picture was taken in 2017 at close to solar minimum.
Sparse and gentle coronal tendrils extend into space.
The upper half was taken approaching solar maximum, six years later.
The corona is ablaze, joined by fiery eruptions from the chromosphere.

Trying to convey the contrasting aspects of the solar corona over the intervening period was a challenge.
Many attempts using image pairs, different colours and combinations proved fruitless.

Unwrapping the normally circular coronal images into a rectangular format which could be ‘mirrored’
revealed a surprising, simple and elegant way of seeing these changes over time within a single image."

A little more about the observatory's owner,
Mr Peter Ward (B.Sc (UWA). ATPL. AIPA)
astrophotography "discoveries/innovations" below....

Digital Measurement of Periodic Error

In late 1997 I was helping test precision worm gears for Scott Losmandy (owner and founder of Hollywood General Machining) for the G-11 equatorial mount usng my SBIG ST4 autoguider.

I mentioned in passing that I used the ST4 autoguider to measure
the periodic error of the gears to one of SBIG's lead engineers, Dr Alan Holmes. "How are you doing that?" he asked. He was puzzled as the system was designed to correct tracking errors, hence there shouldn't be anything useful to measure!

My solution was simple: disable the guder's corrections, and simply plot the guide star's positions from a starting datum.

SBIG's CCDOPS software allowed generation of a "track-log" file so the guide star data which could be easily exported to and graphed in a spreadsheet..

He said he was constantly amazed by applications for their products that users came up with and this was one of them.

The measuring periodic error was a function subsequently added to the "new" STV autoguider that superceded the venerable ST4 autoguider in the year 2000.

Milkyway Arch panoramas

In 2006 I was wanting to create a 360 degree panorama image of star trails in the night sky,
but did not have the multiple cameras or software necessary to stitch the multiple time exposures
that would be required for such an image.

My "eureka moment" was realising I could do this with a single camera,
fitted with a180 degree circular fisheye lens and a new "re-mapping" feature in Photoshop CS.
The Photoshop tool allowed the conversion of images from polar to retangular co-ordinates
.
I then took a sequence of time exposures over a period of several hours with the fisheye lens pointed at the zenith, stacked them show the star trails, and converted the circular fisheye image (i.e. polar) to a rectangular one.

The image's horizontal aspect was then elongated by Pi x number of horizontal pixels, and I had my 360 panorama. I also applied the same technique to a single frame, and the proverbial night sky "Milky Way arch" was created.

I received the David Malin innovation award for the method, and, a NASA APOD in 2007 for the star trail image.

Ultra wide panoramas of the Milky Way since been replicated and improved upon many times since,
Contemporary imagers now use panoramic heads and automatic stitching-software that no longer geometrically distorts the star shapes.

However it all started with the above image taken in 2006 at Mudgee Observatory in NSW, Australia..

Discovered by John Frederick William Herschel on 16 March 1834 is the 3576th entry in is New General Catalog: unsurprisingly labeled NGC3576
A computer software routine has removed the stars from the original image, leaving behind just the nebula structure.
Shades of grey in the original data have been mapped to a palette sampled from press imagery of
Australia's devastating fires of 2019/2020 during which time the Observatory was often heavily shrouded by bushfire smoke.

The dome is a Sirius 2.3 metre "home-model" fibreglass dome. It is around 30 years old now, having withstood numerous Sydney thunderstorms, downpours and hail with ease. Apart from the occasional "cut and polish" using automotive cleaners, the observatory has required little maintenance. It is fully robotic, with both shutter and dome rotation being controllable via a Cat-5 network cable running to the house. The system is also accessible via the internet. You can view a selection from the gallery of images here	Above the Woronora River valley, this image shows Barden Ridge looking south. The distant buildings at top centre of the frame are Australia's only Nuclear Science and Technolgy facility (ANSTO) .
The main telescope is an Alluna Optics 16" Ritchey-Chretien. An Astro-Physics GTX F6.3 is used for Solar Imaging Also used are an AP155 F7 refractor and AP305mm Riccardi Honders Astrograph The mount is a Paramount MEII. The mount is attached to a 10" diameter, powder-coated steel pier, dyna-bolted to a concrete and brick column below the observatory deck.
	Weather monitoring is carried out by a Boltwood Mark II weather sensor. It measures mean wind speed, humidity, cloud cover, ambient light and detects rainfall...plus the occasional arachnid that wanders under the lower sensor, thus closing the dome !
Things that make the observatory work better 1: AllSky webcam Sometimes the Boltwood monitor misses high/thin cloud. This camera uses a Point Grey Cricket IP camera and uploads images to the Web every 3 minutes The all-weather housing is made from some PVC plumbing parts, duct tape, and an acrylic dome from a RC drone, Ugly but functional !	Things that make the dome work better 2: Delonghi de-humidifier, on a self timer that activates just before dawn. The clear plastic tube drains to underneath the observatory deck. The carpeted floor has saved many an eyepiece and instrument from certain destruction.
. The image above is typical of the imaging performance the RH305mm telescope. This deep image of the Horse Head nebula was taken over many nights, partly due to the very dim nature of the dust cloud, but mainly due the massive amount of sky glow from the Sydney urban sprawl.	Things that make the observatory better 3: NPort USB to RS232 hub. Essential for controlling the dome, filter-wheels etc.
The business end of the telescopes. The RC16 is fitted with a Telescope Control Centre which controls and monitors: Absolute focus, fan speed, ambient, primary and secondary temperatures. secondary dew heater Instrument rotator The Precision Instrument Rotator (PIR) can rotate the CCD camera to a repeatable 0.1 of a degree for guide star acquisition. The 16 Megapixel SBIG STX16803 uses 65mm square filters.
	A second 6.0 megapixel Point Grey CCD is used for solar images. Looking a bit like Frankenstein's monster the camera is cooler via two PC CPU heatsinks and fans coupled to 2x 60 watt peltier coolers. As a result the camera typically reports an operating temperature of around 24 degrees....a vast improvement over its normal 40 degree operating temperature! The camera is also used with a SBIG CFW10 filter-wheel fitted with Custom Scientific SII, H-Alpha (3nm and 10nm) OIII filters plus Astro-Don RGB imaging filters for occasional planetary imaging sessions.

Above: The transit of Venus...required a field trip! Below: The great nebula in Carina	Above: The Ara nebula in narrow band. Below: Sun in H-Alpha

Below: Sydney's Summer thunderstorms. Surge protectors on expensive observatory equipment is mandatory!	Below: Total solar eclipse taken a few miles north west of the observatory... :)..... Exmouth Western Australia

Some QuickTime VR movies, imaged near Mudgee NSW can be found at the links below Southern Star trails (right) and associated web page The Southern Milky way (Windows users will need to install an Apple Quicktime player for their browsers to view these)