When the Moon was rising last night it looked ever so pretty with its golden colour and the bright planet Jupiter that was only 2 degrees away on the ecliptic.
 
The golden colour is caused by the Moons light having to travel longer through our Earths atmosphere because of aerosols in the sky; once it gets higher the Moon takes on its usually silvery light.
 
Image taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens @400mm exposure time was 1/30th second with ISO250 and aperture at F11.

Have you ever wanted to learn the night sky?
Join Noeleen from the Southern Astronomical Society to see how easy it is to find the constellations, planets and other beautiful celestial objects in the night sky, even from your own back garden.
 
Please scan the QR code on the poster below to book or go to GC Libraries What’s on at:
https://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/libraries/Whats-on?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D160827310

Noeleen Lowndes is the former president of the Southern Astronomical Society on the Gold Coast and is now a lifetime member. She has actively been involved with astronomy and space education for over 25 years and has supported Gold Coast Libraries with astronomy events since 2003.
 
Noeleen has been a member with NASA’s Saturn Observation Campaign (SOC) for the past 20 years where she educates the public on NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn, then shows the real planet through her large telescope to everyone’s delight.

We are camping at the moment at Flanagan Reserve at Rathdowney near the NSW border. Right in front of our camp facing west is Mt Maroon and 50 minutes after sunset what should I see but the lovely waxing crescent Moon with planet Mercury just about to be occulted by a mountain :-)

Rathdowney is about 150 kilometres west of the Gold Coast out in the country so it has very dark skies at night; to my delight those pretty rusty deep orange volcanic aerosols are still showing up in the twilight sky from the Hunga-Tonga eruption.

A young 2 or 3 day old Moon is the perfect time to take a photo of this lunar phenomenon called Earthshine; it’s just the Earths light reflecting back onto the Moon’s surface but it looks pretty awesome!
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Images were taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 28-400mm lens; the first image was a 4 second exposure with ISO100. The lunar images were taken with same camera and lens, set on 400mm with 20 images stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS.

What was it like at dawn this morning…just breathtaking!
 
The photographs speak for themselves; those volcanic aerosols high up in our atmosphere from the Hunga-Tonga eruption produce these gorgeous colours seen in the sky above where the Sun will be rising.
​ (Sunrise today is at 6.33am)
 
Images were taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens, exposure times range from 4 seconds to 1/30th second and ISO100.

​At last after a lot of cloudy weather we’ve had a lovely clear evening to see those beautiful deep purple colours produced by volcanic aerosols from the Hunga-Tonga eruption that are still lingering in our twilight skies.
 
It’s predicted from a few scientific sources that observers here in the Southern Hemisphere could see this pretty sky phenomena for many months to come or maybe up to another whole year! Wow…. That’s amazing!
 
As the months go by you see the different constellations setting in the west
​this time it’s Leo (The lion) and part of Hydra (The Water Serpent)
 
Image taken at 6.25pm, an hour and 10 minutes after the Sun has set (sunset was at 5.15pm) with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens at 18mm, the exposure was 13seconds and ISO320.

What a surprise I got when I looked at the Sun late this afternoon and saw this huge prominence putting on an incredible show on the south-western limb of the Sun…what an enormous prominence it was with so much power…. Our star is truly awesome!
 
It’s been reported on Spaceweather.com that it’s a giant wall of scorching hot plasma that’s more than five times taller than our entire planet Earth!
 
Images were taken with a Lunt solar telescope and a Canon 700D camera with a 2x Barlow lens attached. To sets of images were captured one for the disc and one set for the prominences, stacked in RegiStax6 and combined in PS.
 
Second image is a close up view that’s an overexposed image to capture the gaseous prominence. Image taken with Lunt 60mm solar telescope and Canon 700D camera, with 5x Powermate lens attached.

Wow! Huge Prominence
 
A live movie of this beautiful prominence on the western limb of the Sun, taken with the Canon 700D in Movie mode for 1 minute and forty seconds using a Lunt 60mm solar telescope and 5x Powermate lens attached to the camera.

~ Our Sun Today on the 13th July 2022 ~
 
The Sun was very active late this afternoon, especially around those two large sunspot groups AR 3053 & AR 3055. There are also some very interesting looking filaments on the solar surface with that huge filament nearing the solar limb that may produce some stunning prominences in the coming days!
 
Images taken with a Lunt 60mm solar telescope and a Canon 700D camera, two sets of images were captures one for the disc and one for the faint prominences and combined in PS.

The dawn of a new era in astronomy has begun as the world gets its first look at the full capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
 
The telescope’s first full-color images and spectroscopic data were released during a televised broadcast at 10:30 a.m. EDT (14:30 UTC) on Tuesday, July 12, 2022, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
 
These listed targets below represent the first wave of full-color scientific images and spectra the observatory has gathered, and the official beginning of Webb’s general science operations. 
 
They were selected by an international committee of representatives from NASA, ESA, CSA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
 
These first images from the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope demonstrate Webb at its full power, ready to begin its mission to unfold the infrared universe.
 
To read more about these amazing images please go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages
 
NASA James Webb Space Telescope website at:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/webb/main/index.html
​

~ The volcanic coloured sky before sunrise on the 8th July 2022 ~
From the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai Eruption 

This was the magnificent view outside my bedroom window when I woke up at 5.30am this morning…Wow!

Embedded within those remarkable colours from the volcanic aerosols are the rising constellations of Taurus (with Venus between the bulls horns) and Orion (The Mighty Hunter), this image was taken at 5.50am.
 
The second image was taken 30 minutes later at 6.20am and you can see the dramatic change in colour of the eastern sky with Venus embedded in the pink and purple crepuscular rays in the dawn sky…sunrise is still 20 minutes away at 6.40am.
 
The third image is just 10 minutes before the Sun rises and I’ve noticed that these volcanic aerosols form a halo around the area where it rises, also the colours get noticeable much lighter, you can still just make out Venus.
 
Peter Lowenstein from Zimbabwe and Tara Williams from NSW Australia are also observing this atmospheric phenomenon and regularly post their wonderful images on Spaceweather.com 
 
My images were taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens; the first image at 5.50am was an 8 second exposure with ISO200. The second image at 6.20am was an exposure of just 1/30th second and ISO200. The third image was taken at 6.28am with an exposure of 1/50th second and ISO100…. Oh, what a beautiful morning it was, I’m very happy to share my images with you :-)

A  rare planetary alignment at dawn with Mercury, Venus, Waning crescent Moon, Mars, Jupiter & Saturn.
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At 5.50am on 25th June 2022 
 
This was the incredible view before dawn this morning an hour before sunrise showing all the planets with a waning crescent Moon right along the ecliptic. I wanted to try and show you some of the atmospheric colours that we’ve been experiencing in our sky by using a fisheye lens.  The colours are breathtakingly beautiful.
 
These volcanic aerosols are from the Hunga-Tonga underwater volcano that erupted in January in Tonga. I really don’t know why, but the colours are becoming more and more vivid over the last couple of days!
 
Image taken with a Canon 6D Mark11 camera and a Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens @10mm using an 8 second exposure and ISO400. The second image taken with Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, the exposure was 8 seconds and ISO1250.
​
The lunar image was taken with the 18-400mm Tamron lens @400mm, ten images were stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS, exposures were 1/30th second and ISO100.