Saturn is now at prime viewing with opposition on the 21st July.  The northern hemisphere of the planet has been tilted our way while the rings have been fully open, but now part of the southern hemisphere is coming into view and the rings are again closing up.  
 
Saturn and Jupiter are now close in the sky on the ecliptic, this astronomical event only happens once every 20 years (or to be exact 19.6 years).  So keep and eye on these two gas giants as both planets slowly edge closer and closer for a spectacular conjunction on the 21st December 2020.
 
I love the way I’ve managed to capture the different coloured bands on the planet and the subtle colours of the gaseous atmosphere and the most amazing thing to think about is Saturn is over 1.4 billion kilometres away from us!
 
Saturn is the most beautiful planet in the solar system because of its stunning ring, now that the Cassini spacecraft is not there up close and personal we have to make do with the view through our telescope eyepiece…. Oh, I so miss the Cassini Spacecraft and the excitement of all the wonderful discoveries it made.
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/overview/
 
My image was taken with a Meade LX200 GPS 10 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a ZWO 120 MC-S camera and 3x Barlow lens attached. An AVI movie with 1500 frames was captured and stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4. 

Late in the evening on the 1st of July, I finally got to image Jupiter for the first time this year, mainly because of all the cloudy weather we’ve been having.
 
I was amazed to see yet again how the area around the Great Red Spot has changed and there appears to be a dark red marking below the (GRS). As all the four main satellite moons of Jupiter were on show orbiting the planet, this is not a shadow transit, so I’m assuming it may be a small active storm.
 
There is another interesting feature, a large white oval storm in the South Temperate Zone that was not there last year. Usually these white oval areas are quite small, I’m finding this intriguing too. Jupiter is so interesting to observe because its turbulent atmosphere is always changing :-)
 
Jupiter comes to opposition on the 14th July and is closest to Earth for viewing, it will rise in the east at the same time as the Sun sets in the west on this date.
 
The image was taken with a Meade LX200 GPS 10 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope at prime focus with a ZWO 120 MC-S camera and 3x Barlow lens attached.
​An AVI movie with 1200 frames was captured and stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4. 

The sunspot is now looking very small in the 127mm refractor telescope as it rotates towards the western limb of the Sun on the 11th June 2020. During this afternoon observing session I was racing against time as cloud was coming all across the western sky.
 
After taking some images with the refractor I quickly removed it off the Pro HEQ5 mount and replaced it with the Lunt 60mm solar telescope to try and capture some images in Ha. (I always use this tracking mount when using both these telescopes)
 
It was really lucky to get a break in the cloud to capture just two AVI movie movies of the area with the Ha telescope before the whole sky clouded over and that was that…no more observing!
 
The white light image was taken with a 127mm refractor telescope that was fitted with a glass solar filter and using a Canon 700D camera.

​Just one image was captured with an exposure time of 1/320h second and ISO400.  The Ha image was taken with the Lunt solar telescope and a ZWO ASI120MC-S camera attached capturing an AVI movie file and stacking in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4.

The late afternoon sky looked just so pretty with the colours of pink and blue in the eastern sky and the neatly full Moon rising between the bands.
 
If you look to the eastern sky after the sun has set you will see this astronomical phenomenon know as the Belt of Venus it’s also know as the Girdle of Venus too. This dusty pink band layered between the blue sky above and the lower deep blue-grey band below runs all along the horizon before sunrise or after sunset.
 
It’s related to our Earths shadow which extends millions of kilometres out into space, so next time you are watching a beautiful sunset take a moment to turn around and see if you can see this spectacular phenomenon low in the eastern sky.
 
I have just found this very interesting website called World of Phenomena that explains the ‘Belt of Venus’ very well along with a lot of other incredible phenomena that you’ll find in the world and up above:
https://www.phenomena.org/atmospheric/beltofvenus/
 
Wikipedia ‘Belt of Venus’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_of_Venus
​

The both images were taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens on a tripod.

​The wide field image is cropped to a vertical image and the exposure time was 1/160th second with ISO400. With the lunar image the lens was set at 400mm with an exposure time of 1/250th second and ISO400, eight images were stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4, image was also cropped.

It was quite late in the afternoon by the time I could finally take an image of this new sunspot on the surface of the Sun. I was having a lot of trouble trying to get some close detail on the sunspot and really could not understand why?
 
After packing up, I looked up towards Mt Tamborine and saw the reason why, a huge forest burn off was taking place and a large plume of smoke was spreading across the western sky. Because of where my telescope was setup between the two houses I was unable to see this smoke, Oh well, at least I was lucky enough to got some images of the sunspot even though they were a bit smoke affected :-)
 
My images were taken on the 5th June 2020, with a 10inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope that was fitted with a glass solar filter and using a ZWO ASI120MC-S camera with a focal reducer attached. The full disc image was taken with a Canon 700D camera, exposure time was 1/500th second and ISO200, 12 images were stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4. The sunspot looked quite small on the full disc of the Sun.

This new sunspot is from the next Solar Cycle 25, please read more about this from
​Dr Tony Phillips who pens the excellent website Spaceweather.com
https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/12/25/reversed-polarity-sunspots-appear-on-the-sun/
 
Another site to keep a daily eye on the Sun is NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) at: https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov

When I looked out my window late this morning, I saw this most amazing colourful ring right around the Sun. I flew downstairs, grabbed my camera and ran outside to capture it before it disappeared. I tried to block out some of the bright Sun with a wild grass plant that I found in the garden and it worked perfectly J
 
There is a lot of science behind one of these 22-degree halos around the Sun and for it to be displayed for us to see there has to be the right shape and size ice crystals in the sky. I’m always on the look out for them when this high cirrostratus cloud in covering the sky, you also can see a lunar halo when the Moon is in a larger phase…. so as I always say keep looking up, you never know what you’ll find!
 
To find out more please go to a couple of informative websites below:
Les Cowley, Atmospheric Optics website at:
https://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/circular.htm
​
There is an excellent explanation and diagrams on how a Sun Halo is produced on the
WW2010 University of Illinois website at:
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/opt/ice/halo/22.rxml

Image taken with a Canon G7x Mark11 on manual focus, with ISO125 and exposure time of 1/200th second.
(Be very careful not to look directly at the Sun, use your camera screen to safely compose the shot)

I could not believe my eyes when I looked outside late yesterday afternoon and saw this most beautiful rainbow in the sky; it was so vivid in colour and right before my eyes a double bow developed. As I moved around the garden I could see its reflection in the water…it was just stunning!
 
I had to keep running inside to change lenses to capture the whole rainbow and finally settled on my Tokina fisheye 10-17mm lens set on 10mm to capture the double rainbow. When I went out onto the boat pontoon I was so surprised to see that the reflection in the water made a full circle rainbow…how cool was that :-)
 
Images were taken on the 24th May using a Canon 70D camera and assortment of lenses grabbed very quickly from my camera bag using a Canon 10-20mm lens & Tokina fisheye lens.

To find out more about rainbows please go our own
​Australian Government Bureau of Metrology (BOM) website at:
http://media.bom.gov.au/social/blog/899/ask-bom-how-do-rainbows-form/

I took this photo of Venus in the late afternoon sky with those pretty purple and pink colours of dusk still in the western sky after sunset. I was in the car park of the Helensvale train station and had to rest the camera on the bonnet of my car to get a steady image of the planet.
 
Image taken with a Canon G7x Mark11 camera on manual focus with a 1/20th second exposure time
​with ISO125 at 5.36pm.

I was on my way home when I saw these amazing coloured iridescent clouds in the sky and just had to stop the car to take some photos.
 
These clouds were very dramatic with some remarkable shapes, including one that looked like it was breaking free to fly across the sky…with some of our home restrictions being lifted now from COVID-19 that’s exactly the way I’m feeling too :-)
 
Cloud iridescence is an optical phenomenon caused by sunlight scattering through the small ice crystals in the clouds; you can also see the Sun in both of the images that is the source of this beautiful display.
 
The images were taken with a Canon G7X Mark11 camera on manual focus, both with ISO125 and exposures of 1/1250th second & 1/1000th second.

The rising Moon looked so beautiful last night as its golden light reflected on the water, it was just one day past full Moon and the Moons colour was just stunning.
 
I tried to capture what it really looked like with the camera, but that was just impossible because of the two different exposures needed to catch the entire scene.
 
So what I’ve done is a composite image of two images:
Using a Canon 70D camera with an 18-400mm lens on a tripod I did two different exposure settings with the Moon in the same position in the image. I took one image with a 2 second exposure, ISO 500 and lens set at 89mm. Then I took the second image at a shorter exposure of 1/30th second with ISO 160 and lens set at 89mm.
 
Both images were then opened in Photoshop; with the brighter image of the Moon I selected just the lunar disc then copied and pasted it into the longer exposure image.
​I had to play around with it a bit…but I’m quite happy with the result :-)
 
For the beautiful ‘Golden Moon’ image I used the same camera setup and zoomed the lens to 400mm, the ISO 160 and 1/30th second exposure @f7.
 
The golden colour is due to aerosols in the earth’s atmosphere low on the horizon and you’ll also notice that the Moon is a little misshaped (squashed) also due to that atmospheric condition.