SAS website at: http://sas.org.au

It was really a lovely evening for this year’s International Observe the Moon night with many families coming along to enjoy their first view of the Moon through our member’s telescopes. Bryan even arranged for the ISS to make a pass over, how cool was that :-)
 
For the first time, I decided to use my little ZWO ASI 120 MC-S one shot colour camera with the Meade 8inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope for a live view of the Moon. Then all I had to do was use the hand controller to slew up and down the terminator line to show people the different features on the lunar surface on the laptop…everyone really enjoyed this.
 
We had a 10-day-old Moon, so the large crater Copernicus was fully on show along with Gassendi crater which was right on the terminator line showing sunrise on the crater edge and sunlit mountain peaks inside the crater. A few people even used there smart phones to take pictures of the Moon from my cameras live view screen and laptop, which I’m sure went straight onto there Facebook pages.
 
Please see some pictures from the event including an image I took of the full disc of the 10-day-old Moon. By the time I got around to taking the Moons image through the telescope dew and light cloud had arrived, so the image isn’t perfect, 
​but we were very lucky indeed to have a clear night for InOMN 2018 :-)

~ International Space Station (ISS) Passover at 7.19pm on the 20th October 2018 during InOMN ~
​Images taken with a Canon 70D camera with a 10-17mm Tokina fisheye lens, movie made in windows moviemaker.

The brilliant planet Venus is still very prominent in our western sky at twilight but it’s now shimmering all the colours of the rainbow as its light is being refracted through particles in our Earths atmosphere.
 
While trying to take this image with a planetary camera it was wobbling all over the place and scintillating with colour. I managed to get a 2-minute AVI movie still enough to stack for this image to show some of the pretty colours…but I’ll definitely be keeping all the other videos of Venus as the planet looked so fascinating!
 
Images were taken with a Meade 10inch LX200 telescope at prime focus and a ZWO ASI 120 MC-S colour camera with a 3x Barlow attached. AVI movie files were captured and stacked and processed in RegiStax6 and PS CS4.

It’s quite amazing to see the difference in size of Venus as it goes from a smaller first quarter Venus (like our Moon) at greatest elongation from the Sun, to a huge crescent phase which is now on show low in the western sky, this is the first time I’ve been able to capture this phenomenon with Venus :-)
 
When Venus is at a small crescent phase like now, it’s actually closer to Earth in its orbit and that is why it’s so much larger as seen through the eyepiece of the telescope. Venus is also an inferior planet and is inside of the Earths orbit, so you will never see Venus crossing the night-time sky like Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
 
Venus stays quite close to the Sun on the ecliptic and sometimes is the brightness object in the night sky. It’s also known as the morning or evening star because of its brightness and beauty.
 
If you would like to know more about Venus please go to NASA’s website at:
https://www.nasa.gov/venus
 
Information on my images: I used the same equipment and camera settings for all of the pictures and they are all to scale in relation to size. The montage of images were taken on the 12th August, 10th September and 2nd October 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.

After taking many images of the planets over the last couple of months with this amazing little ZWO camera, I decided to slew over to the 8 day old Moon and see how it went along the terminator line…and I must say I was blown away by the detail on the surface of the Moon!
 
I didn’t want to change any of the settings or adaptors on the telescope as I was just filling in time until Mars had gone over the zenith. My telescope when in Alt/Az mode does not like pointing straight up into the sky, it seems to spin on its base and not track properly, but when it’s in equatorial mode I have not trouble at all. (I use a 10inch LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope).
 
 The first image shows what is known as the big three craters, Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus & Arzachel with the other large crater Albategnius to the right of Ptolemaeus. To get some prospective on how large some of these craters are Ptolemaeus is an incredible 153 km in diameter and 2400m high!
 
The second image shows some stunning detail of the lunar mountain range called Montes Alpes and the 3600 m high Mons Blanc (Mt Blanc) with the 180km Alpine Valley running through it.
​Also on show is the extremely bright mountain peak called Mons Piton (Mt Piton) at 2250 m high on the smooth Maria called Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains).
 
The large flooded crater (to the right) is called Cassini and is 57 km in diameter and has two crater inside called Cassini A and B.
 
With this phase of the Moon we are seeing sunrise on the terminator line (day/night horizon) and everything on the sunlit side is being thrown into sharp detail. (Images taken last quarter Moon on the 18th September 2018)
​
AVI movies were captured with about 3000 frames as the seeing wasn’t great, there was also some light cloud in the sky so the surface of the Moon was a bit wobbly…but RegiStack6 did great in stacking the images…I’m very happy with this little camera for planetary imaging :-)

Please go to my NASA’s Saturn Observation Campaign education link to see and read all about another wonderful evening where we showed members of the public the beautiful planet Saturn and other celestial objects in the night sky…. it was awesome!
http://www.mystardustobservatory.com/nasas-saturn-observation-campaign.html

The night sky here in Australia at the moment is a stargazers delight with the brilliant planets Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars all beautifully displayed across the night sky. A few nights ago I got one of those very rare moments when the seeing went ever so calm and I managed to get some outstanding images of Saturn high up at the zenith :-)
 
I then overexposed the disc of Saturn to see if I could capture any of the moons, and to my delight there they were five of them, the three moons in the shape of a triangle were Enceladus, Tethys and Dione, the two moons further out were Rhea and Titan.
 
The second image is a composite because I had to use two different exposure times, a shorter one to capture the body of Saturn, and a longer exposure time to capture the faint moons of the planet.
 
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.

My first time I've ever captured some of the moons of Saturn, they are Enceladus, Tethys and Dione, with Rhea and Titan further away from the planet.

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.