u/Somerandom1922

As I said, I love this car, but after driving it for nearly 6 months, I've encountered a couple of things that I have questions about and am hoping you lovely folk might know the answer (note, I've googled all of my questions pretty extensively).

For the main headlights, I'm unable to completely disable them, even when selecting "0" on the headlight knob (they stay on at the dimmest level and the rear lights stay on too). I do astrophotography and would love to be able to keep the car running (charging batteries, keeping warm etc.) without lighting up the environment around me. I know it's a pretty niche requirement and it's not a dealbreaker, but is there some setting I'm missing?
Does the high-voltage hybrid battery system provide power to the 12v system at all? I'm pretty sure it doesn't because shortly after I bought the car I got a dead 12v battery while the hybrid system still had lots of range. Except the scheduled climate controls require the car to be connected to AC power, making me think that it somehow can talk to it.

Basically, aside from being a daily-driver, I'm using it for camping and driving to really remote places for astrophotography and I'm absolutely loving it for both, but I wonder if there's anything it can do that I'm missing out on.

Hardware: Nikon D7200, Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8, Manfrotto ART190

Exposures: Milky Way - 195s (13x 15s), Landscape - 270s (16x 15s + 1x 30s)

Post-Processing: 3 stacks Sequator (Milky Way + Landscape + Tree on the right) with colour adjustments and editing them together done in gimp.

Description: This was my first proper attempt at any sort of astrophotography with stacking. I bought the camera recently because I wanted to get into photography.

I made 3 different stacks in Sequator, one for the milky way, another for the landscape, and another for that tree on the right which was moving around a bunch. I combined them all in GIMP, playing with the levels until they blended together well.

The photos were taken from Governor's Chair Lookout about 90km south-west of Brisbane (that's the light in the left of frame).

I'm fairly happy with it, although despite the number of exposures, I feel like I'm lacking detail in the milky way. I reckon I could probably pull more out if I was better at using GIMP. Any feedback would be appreciated.

I mean Hal is basically a Skybreaker right?

I recently bought a 2023 XC60 T8 and am loving it, but I have some questions.

Milky Way Core Over South-East Queensland