There is a spectacular celestial display happening in the western sky after sunset for anybody who takes the time to go outside and have a look…
 
A meeting of two of the brightest planets in our solar system is taking place and they are getting closer and closer every day…so please hop off your comfortable lounge and pop outside to take a look at the wonderful display :-)
 
If you have a look at the close up photo of the planets you can just make a couple of the moons of Jupiter beside the planet, which was lovely to capture.
 
Images were taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400 mm lens on a tripod; the lens was set at 163mm for the wide field with a 0.4 second exposure and ISO1600.
​For the close up image of the planets the lens was set at 44mm and exposure was 0.6 seconds, ISO1600. 

What a wonderful surprise I got today when I saw that my images of the planets Venus & Jupiter taken from a plane at 30,000 ft were showcased on the front page of Spaceweather.com 
https://www.spaceweather.com
https://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=157631
 
This is such an awesome website that is penned daily by Dr Tony Phillips, where current up to date information is given on the Sun-Earth environment with daily information about the Sun.  At least once or twice a day I check what’s happening in our sky and just love looking at all the images posted.
 
The added beauty of the website, is that people from all over the world can share there images of what’s happening in the daytime and night-time sky…it’s an incredible way to bring us all together on planet Earth by observing the natural wonders of the universe that we live in…

On the evening of the 16th November we boarded a plane for a flight from Christchurch in New Zealand to the Gold Coast in Australia.
 
What a wonderful surprise I got when I looked out my plane window and saw the beautiful colours of sunset in the evening sky with the brilliant planets Venus and Jupiter in the western sky with the constellation of Scorpius…it looked absolutely stunning!
 
When I wiggled around in my seat I also spied the constellation of the Southern Cross (Crux) with the pointers that was upside down in the south western sky, the colour gradient from a light blue sky to the inky black sky above the plane was quite breathtaking…
 
The images were taken with a Canon G7X Mark11 camera on manual focus and ISO 1600. To capture the images I had to put a jacket over my head to block out all the lights from the interior of the plane…I got many strange looks from the other passengers, but I just smiled and kept taking the pictures :-)

The Southern Cross upside down (inverted) going down in the south-western sky at a height of over 30,000 ft with the stunning colours of sunset in the late evening sky.
 
The bright stars Alpha and Beta Centauri, which are the pointers to the Cross, are also on display to the right…what a glorious sight it was from my aeroplane window :-)

Free to download, new posters from NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program feature horrifyingly inhospitable planets located outside our solar system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worlds/galaxy-of-horrors/

Just in time for Halloween, NASA has released two new posters celebrating some truly terrifying exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. Free to download, the entertaining posters recall vintage horror movie advertisements but have a decidedly astronomical focus.

​Dubbed Galaxy of Horrors, the fun but informative series resulted from a collaboration of scientists and artists and was produced by NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program Office, located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The same program is behind the popular Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster series, which imagines humans visiting some of the thousands of known worlds outside our solar system.

We had a beautiful clear sky all day and then those pesky clouds decided to come from nowhere and nearly spoilt our evening to look at the Moon!
 
A lot of members from SAS (Southern Astronomical Society) turned up to help on the night and a lot of excited people managed to get a peek of the Moon and Saturn through our large telescopes when some clear patches of night sky came through, but we had to be quick…
 
The Tamborine Lions Club did an outstanding job, as always, with the sausage sizzle and we were all given a yummy sausage sizzle treat too :-)
 
Please see below some images that I took on the evening that were included in the InOMN article reported by Bryan Pott and myself in our clubs newsletter and displayed by our editor Julie Lancaster for the October edition.

If you would like to read the whole ‘Event Horizon’ e-newsletter please go to:
https://sas.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Oct-EH-SAS.pdf
 
If you attended the SAS InOMN on the 5th October at Tamborine then please download you certificate (at the link below) and add your name to celebrate your participation in International Observe the Moon Night 2019 :-)
https://moon.nasa.gov/resources/387/2019-international-observe-the-moon-night-certificate/

Main InOMN website at:
 https://moon.nasa.gov/observe-the-moon/annual-event/overview/

You must see this beautiful video of our amazing Moon in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, what an incredible celestial object it is in the night sky…you only have to go outside look up and there it is! Enjoy :-)

Credit: NASA
Introduction by David A. Kring
 
“From the Earth to the Moon” is a brief, but vivid video and audio recording that
Provides an inspirational view of the lunar surface, which humans have not visited since 1972, despite being the best and most accessible place in the solar system to explore the fundamental principles of our origins;
Highlights vast portions of the lunar surface that have yet to be explored; and
Demonstrates how new images are revealing dramatic details of future landing sites suitable for both robotic and human missions. 
The scenes in the video are so dramatic that you may find yourself reaching out to pick up a rock and becoming restless to walk among the lunar peaks.  We encourage you to download the HD version of the video (see link below) to fully marvel at this tour of the lunar surface.
https://moon.nasa.gov/resources/330/from-the-earth-to-the-moon/

Additional details about the scenes in “From the Earth to the Moon”
 
The video provides views of (i) the lunar nearside, (ii) a flyover of the heavily cratered lunar highlands, (iii) Oceanus Procellarum, (iv) a zoomed-in perspective of Aristarchus crater, (v) a flight down Vallis Schröteri, (vi) an oblique perspective of Aristarchus crater, (vii) crater walls within Aristarchus, (viii) a pull away perspective of Aristarchus crater, (ix) a zoomed-in rotating view of Tycho crater, (x) flybys of five central peak features within Tycho crater, (xi) a pull away perspective of Tycho crater with distinct panels of images to illustrate a variety of spatial resolutions and albedo, (xii) a rotating view of Tycho crater from a position slightly above its rim, (xiii) a pull away perspective of Tycho crater, (xiv) rotating perspective of Orientale basin, (xv) rotating and pull away perspective from Orientale basin, (xvi) dawn rising over Tsiolkovsky crater, and (xvii) Earth rising over the lunar surface.
 
The Lunar and Planetary Institute’s (LPI’s) mission is to advance understanding of the solar system by providing exceptional science, service, and inspiration to the world.
 
LPI is operated by USRA under a cooperative agreement with the Science Mission Directorate of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/exploration/moonVideo/
https://www.lpi.usra.edu
​

This was the stunning view late this afternoon which marked this special day for the  ‘Vernal Equinox’ here in the southern hemisphere, the whole western sky had these spectacular crepuscular rays right up to the zenith…absolutely beautiful :-)
 
Image taken at 5.17pm on the 23rd September 2019 with a Canon Gx7 Mark11 camera set on manual at focal length of 11mm, ISO 125 and exposure was 1/1250th second.

This very pretty planetary nebula is quite large and bright and can easily be found among the stars in the northern sky in Vulpecula.  
 
About 4,000 years ago an elderly, bloated giant red star, gave its last gasp and shed off its outer skin exposing its still pulsating heart. What’s left now is an extremely hot white dwarf star that’s exciting the bubble of ionized gas that still surrounds it.
 
This was the first planetary nebula ever discovered by Charles Messier in 1764 while he was comet hunting in the night sky. Please see more details on (M27) on the SEDS website at:
http://www.messier.seds.org/m/m027.html
 
The image above was taken at my Stardust Observatory on the 1st September 2019, with a Meade 80mm refractor and a Canon 70D camera, which was tracking on the larger 10inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. There were 15x3 minute images with 10x3 minute darks stacked in DSS and processed in CS4, ISO 2000 and image is cropped.

To find more star charts on the constellations please go to:
https://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations

At this time of year here in the southern hemisphere, the Milky Way straddles each side of the zenith and over the night arc’s down into the western sky, so there is plenty of time to capture lots of deep sky objects in this area around the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
 
So over the next couple of months on the dark new Moon weekend I’ll try and image as many of these beautiful deep sky objects as I can and share them with you from my Stardust observatory at Leyburn in Australia.
 
~ The Eagle Nebula M16 in Serpens ~
 
The Eagle nebula is a diffuse emission nebula and star cluster in the constellation of Serpens (Cauda), it’s a region of star formation with glowing hydrogen gas due to the excitation from ultraviolet radiation emitted by hot young stars embedded in the nebula. The star cluster associated with the nebula is called (NGC 6611).
 
There are two shapes you can see in this nebula, one is the overall shape that does look like an eagle with its spreading wings but the other shape is in the heart of the nebula where the Star Queen gets it’s name and where the Hubble Space telescope imaged the astounding ‘Pillars of Creation’ area in 1995.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_Creation
 
It’s estimated that the distance to M16 is about 6000 light years and its diameter is 35 light years, the estimated age is 2-6 million years old.
 
The other two open star clusters close to M16 (in the top right) is called Trumpler 32 and the denser star cluster (in the bottom right corner) is called NGC 6605.
 
I took this image with a Meade 80mm refractor telescope and a Canon 70D camera that was being tracked on top of a larger Meade LX200 10inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope in my observatory.
I managed to capture only 7x3 minute images before the clouds came rolling in, I’ll try and capture this object again next month to obtain a lot more data and a smoother in-depth picture.
 
For more information about this wonderful area of sky please go to the links below:
NASA’s Hubble Messier Catalog at:
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-s-messier-catalog
 
Wikipedia Messier Objects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_object
Eagle Nebula (M16)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula
 
SEDS  (The Messier Catalog)
http://www.messier.seds.org
http://www.messier.seds.org/m/m016.html
http://www.messier.seds.org/CONindex2.html
 
Constellation Maps to help you at IAU (International Astronomical Society)
https://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations

NASA News 18th September 2019

It's the final boarding call for you to stow your name on NASA's Mars 2020 rover before it launches to the Red Planet. The Sept. 30 deadline for NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign gives the mission enough time to stencil the submitted names - over 9.4 million so far - on a chip that will be affixed to the Mars 2020 rover.
This rover is scheduled to launch as early as July 2020 and expected to touch down on Mars in February 2021.

The Mars 2020 rover represents the initial leg of humanity's first planned round trip to another planet.
With this robotic scientist weighing 2,300 pounds (1,040 kilograms), the Mars 2020 mission will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet's climate and geology, collect samples for future return to Earth, and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.

"As we get ready to launch this historic Mars mission, we want everyone to share in this journey of exploration," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "It's an exciting time for NASA as we embark on this voyage to answer profound questions about our neighboring planet, and even the origins of life itself."

The opportunity to send your name to Mars, which opened on May 21, 2019, comes with a souvenir boarding pass and "frequent flyer" points. This is part of a public engagement campaign to highlight missions involved with NASA's journey from the Moon to Mars. Miles (or kilometers) are awarded for each "flight," with corresponding digital mission patches available for download.

​ More than 2 million names flew on NASA's InSight mission to Mars, giving each "flyer" about 300 million frequent flyer miles (nearly 500 million frequent flyer kilometers).
You can add your name to the list and obtain a souvenir boarding pass to Mars here:
https://go.nasa.gov/Mars2020Pass