The golden sunset yesterday afternoon on North Stradbroke Island (Minjerribab) was just so beautiful. As the tide was coming in on the beach at Adder Point I was able to capture a pretty glitter path to the Sun, where you can see hundreds of little Suns reflected in the waves and on the water.
 
There are many ways to enjoy and capture our amazing Star the Sun :-)
 
Image was taken on the 27th August 2018 with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens set at 70mm and F11, the exposure time was 1/500th of a second and ISO 100.

To find out more about this beautiful island and its culture please go to the Queensland Governments website at:
https://www.npsr.qld.gov.au/parks/naree-budjong-djara/culture.html

The atmosphere on the dusty planet Mars is starting to clear up a bit as you can see from a couple of my images taken between the 11th and the 22nd of August.  But unfortunately our Earth is now racing away from the planet and Mars will just become smaller and smaller as viewed through the telescope.

I have been so lucky to have had over three weeks of fine weather to take pictures and observe Mars and even though a dust storm encircled the whole planet, I was at least able to capture some surface features on the planet…and I’m very happy about that :-)
​
These montages of images were taken between the 11th and the 22nd August 2018 with a Meade 10inch LX200 telescope and a ZWO ASI 120 MC-S colour camera with a 3x Barlow attached. AVI movie files were captured and then processed in RegiStax6 and PS CS4.

​​It’s the 12th of August and I’m getting ready to take some more images of Mars and the other planets with my Meade 10inch LX200 telescope and a ZWO ASI 120 MC-S colour CCD camera and just look how bright Mars is in the eastern sky…its just brilliant! Perhaps it because of the global dust storm and all the dust particles are being reflected back to us here on Earth!
 
I don’t have a lot of viewing area here at home with just a small gap between our house and the house next door.  But the ecliptic is right in the middle of this gap, so I’m so happy to have been able to take so many pictures of the planets during this fantastic opposition of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus :-)

I just love this little ZWO ASI 120 MC-S colour CCD camera, it does an amazing job of capturing detail on the surface of the planets and I would recommend it to anybody wishing to take planetary images.

I only just managed to capture the occultation of Ganymede at the edge of Jupiter before it disappeared on the evening of the 11th August; another moon called Europa was also fast approaching the planet for another disappearing act…Jupiter is always such a surprise to observe as you never know what your going to see!
 
Jupiter’s four Galilean moons are always doing a moon dance around its parent planet, so there will be nights when you will see all four of the moons strung out along Jupiter’s ecliptic in more or less a straight line. Sometimes, you will see a moon just pop into view or disappear like my photo above when it goes behind Jupiter. And sometimes you will see a dark shadow crossing the surface of the planet when a moon is transiting or crossing in front of the surface of the planet…it’s the Suns light, which causes the shadow of the moon to fall on the surface of Jupiter’s.
 
If you want to keep track of where Jupiter moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) are when observing the planet then you’ll find this information in a couple of places.
 
The first in written form in the Australian publication called Astronomy 2018, which is an astronomer’s bible for the night sky and you can buy it at any astronomy shop or bookstore. The next is in your country’s current astronomy and space magazine.
 
But my favourite place, if you have a smart phone or iPad is a FREE App called Gas Giants, which shows you in the field exactly what’s happening with the Galilean system while viewing the planet through your telescope, it can be found in the App store at:
https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/gas-giants/id397831483?mt=8
 
My image was taken on the 11th August 2018 with a Meade 10inch LX200 telescope and a ZWO ASI 120 MC-S colour CCD camera with a 3x Barlow attached. Its just one AVI movie file (2500 frames) stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4.

~ Night of the Planets ~
 
This past month has been all about the planets; on show in the night sky have been Mercury low down on the western horizon, then the pretty quarter phase of Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, then dusty Mars all on view right across the ecliptic.
 
I set up my 10inch Meade LX200 Schmidt-cassegrain telescope here at home on the 31st July in the hope of capturing as much detail on the surface of Mars over the coming weeks and because of the extremely fine weather that we’ve had that’s where the telescope has been ever since. (I’ve made sure that the telescope has been covered up and protected)
 
Unfortunately Mars has had that huge dust storm on the surface so not much detail has been observed which is such a shame, because this years very close opposition was going to be just spectacular with Mars at only 58 million kilometres away from Earth.
 
So while out taking pictures of Mars I also had fun capturing all the other planets too, which I’ve put together in this montage of images that were all taken on the night of the 9th August 2018. Please note, that all the planets are to scale in size, just look at how huge Mars is as compared with the body of Saturn…now that’s amazing!
 
All images were taken with a Meade 10inch LX200 telescope and a ZWO ASI 120 MC-S colour CCD camera with a 3x Barlow attached. AVI movie files were captured and then processed in RegiStax6 and PS CS4. 

There had been quite a lot of cirrocumulus cloud mixed with high cirrus clouds crossing the sky today which always makes me keep an eye out for atmospheric phenomena of any kind…especially Sundogs and solar halo’s.
 
But today I got a real treat; not only was there a lovely Sundog in the sky, there were also these unusual soft pastel streaks of thin coloured cloud between thicker layers of clouds, they were very pretty and striking in colour.
 
The colours are caused by the light from the Sun being diffracted out in the sky by the tiny ice crystals in the thin cirrus cloud which creates this rainbow like effect…it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it spread out so far across the sky like this :-)
 
If you would like to read more about these pretty iridescent clouds please go to Les Cowley’s excellent Atmospheric Optics website at: https://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/irid1.htm
 
Images were taken on the 7th August 2018 with just my point and shot Canon G15 camera that I always keep in my handbag; the camera was set on manual focus. 

I’ve tried and tried nearly every night (like everyone else) to capture some detail on the surface of Mars, and this is the best that I’ve been able to get with my 10inch telescope.
 
Not only have we had to contend with our own weather here on Earth of cloud, smoke and haze, but ironically also this huge dust storm that has encircled the whole planet during this very close opposition…but it’s starting to clear and just perhaps we may be rewarded with some spectacular views before our Earth races away from the planet,
​I’ll keep trying :-)
 
This montage of images were taken between the 31st July and the 5th August 2018 with a Meade 10inch LX200 telescope and a ZWO ASI 120 MC-S colour CCD camera with a 3x Barlow attached. AVI movie files were captured and then processed in RegiStax6 and PS CS4.

The planet Mars has had a global dust storm raging on its surface since the beginning of June, now it looks like its finally clearing a little for us to view its surface…Yay!

I set up my telescope tonight (31st July 2018) and took lots of images of Mars, it’s now nearly 3.30am and I thought I would just post these images before going to bed.
 
I also took some beautiful images of Jupiter and Saturn, which I’ll post onto my blog in the next couple of days :-)
 
Image was taken with a Meade 10inch LX200 telescope and a ZWO ASI 120 MC-S colour CCD camera with a 3x Barlow attached. AVI movie files were captured and then processed in RegiStax6 and PS CS4.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope photographed Mars on July 18, near its closest approach to Earth since 2003. The planet was observed near opposition, when the Sun, Earth and Mars are lined up, with Earth sitting in between the Sun and Mars. This proximity gives the Red Planet its brightest appearance in the night sky since the 2003 opposition.
It’s springtime in Mars’ southern hemisphere, where a dust storm erupted and ballooned into a global event that is now blanketing the entire planet. Even so, several distinctive features can be identified.
 
Please go to the Hubble website to read more of the story at:
Hubble https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2018/mars-opposition-201

NASA Mars Exploration Rover Status Report
Updated at 2:25 p.m. PDT on July 26, 2018
It's the beginning of the end for the planet-encircling dust storm on Mars. But it could still be weeks, or even months, before skies are clear enough for NASA's Opportunity rover to recharge its batteries and phone home.
​The last signal received from the rover was on June 10.
​
Continue reading the story at:
https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8348/opportunity-hunkers-down-during-dust-storm/

Released on the August 20, 2015
2015 marks 50 years of successful NASA missions to Mars starting with Mariner 4 in 1965. Since then, a total of 15 robotic missions led by various NASA centers have laid the groundwork for future human missions to the Red Planet. The journey to Mars continues with additional robotic missions planned for 2016 and 2020, and human missions in the 2030s.