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.

The Moon was a beautiful golden colour as it rose in the evening sky last night, we have a lot of swans on our lake at the moment and they were gliding past in the glitter path created by the moonlight. I had to wait quite a while for the right moment to capture one of them fully in the moonlit path…and I got it :-)
 
Image taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens set at 77mm, ISO 400 and exposure time 1/6th of a second. I took another corresponding image at a quicker exposure of 1/30th second because the moons surface was so bright, and then just blended the moons surface only into the picture.

You will have to have a very clear low western horizon to catch this one if you live in South East Queensland, because the Moon sets in the west at 6.36am and maximum eclipse (Totality) is at 6.22am,
​this will be neatly at the same time as the sunrise.
 
But saying that, you’ll still enjoy seeing the first half of the eclipse, which begin at 4.24am, and if the horizon is still clear for you lunar totality will start at 5.30am, it might look very pretty with the dawn colours and the red planet Mars very close by the Moon.
 
If you have the publication Astronomy 2018, you’ll find all the times for the other states in Australia on page 92.
Good Luck everyone :-)

Images from a previous Total Eclipse of the Moon as seen from the Gold Coast in QLD Australia :-)

I will post some images soon of this one if the sky is clear and I can see the eclipse above the houses and trees which are across the road from me here on the Gold Coast!

I had some fun today taking these images of the Sun and Moon with just my camera and lens set up.
I used a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens plus a 2x telecoverter with a glass solar filter safely attached to the front of the lens, this made for a focal length of 1280mm, the camera was attached to a tracking HEQ5 mount.
 
I already had the tracking mount setup when I took some image earlier in the day with my solar telescope, and I thought…Hmmm, why not put my camera on the mount and track the sky, all I did was take the adapter bracket off the bottom of the Lunt solar scope and attached to the bottom of the Canon 70D camera and presto,
​I was on my way :-)
 
You can just make out the sunspot group AR2715 on the surface of the Sun and the Moon is in a waxing gibbous phase, during the evening I used the same lens at 18mm and took a wide field photo of Jupiter above the Moon with the constellation of Scorpius rising in the east…by this time the sky was very light from the Moon, but the scene looked very pretty in the night sky.
 
So how did I take the pictures, for both the Sun and the Moon images I did a burst of 20 images then stacked them in RegiStax6 and lightly processed them in PS CS4. The exposures for both objects is very short, the Sun 1/500th second and the Moon 1/250th second and ISO100 or ISO200.

These photos do really show that you can get some great astrophotography images even if you don’t have an expensive telescope. You can still take really good shots of both the Sun and Moon with just an ordinary camera tripod, but having a tracking mount like the one mentioned above does make it so much easier to take images.

The Sun has been so quite visually for a long now, so when a sunspot emerges everyone is excited, unfortunately its been cloudy here so this is the first time I’ve been able to get the solar scope out to take some pictures, to add to this, we have a bit of smoke in the sky from some burning off, so the sky’s a bit hazy…
 
I was hoping to catch a solar prominence from AR2713 as it hit the western limb of the Sun, but that did not happen and the larger sunspot group AR2715 seems to be getting smaller. While taking this image AR2715 brightened slightly and if you look closely at the shape of the sunspot you can see a pretty heart shape…that heart shape sunspot is larger than our planet Earth!
 
Image taken a with a H-alpha Lunt 60mm solar telescope and a ZWO ASI 120MC-S CCD camera at prime focus, AVI file stacked in RegisStax6 and processed in PS CS4 :-)

The western sky was so pretty yesterday afternoon with the new crescent Moon and the planet Venus shinning brilliantly beside one another for a close conjunction on the 16th June 2018.
​
My Images were taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens on a tripod. First image ISO1600 lens set at 25mm and exposure time was half a second, second image lens set at 117mm, ISO6400 exposure time 1/6th second exposure :-)

Beautiful Earthshine on the surface of the Moon, sometimes it can be very hard to capture but not tonight…it looked so beautiful here at my Stardust Observatory at Leyburn.

Again, a lot of the time you don’t need a telescope to capture the beauty of the night sky, just grab your camera and lenses and take the pictures, I do ;-)

Jupiter always looks stunning in the night sky and on the evening of the 16th June at 9.45pm the Great Red Spot rotated into view for me to capture some images to make this picture :-)
 
Images were taken at my Stardust Observatory using the 10inch Meade LX200 Schmidt-cassegrain telescope and a ZWO ASI 120MC-S CCD camera with a 3x Barlow lens attached. I captured an AVI movie file and stacked 1800 images together in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4.

What an exciting time it is now with a wonderful display of the three planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the night sky. The magnificent planet Jupiter was the best that I’ve ever seen it with so much detail on its surface and one of its moon called Io not that far away. 
 
The red planet Mars was in a gibbous phase as our planet quickly approaches it for a very close opposition at the end of July and Saturn also looked beautiful and will look even better with opposition at the end of June…so try and make some time to go outside to look up and see some of our planetary neighbours :-)
 
Images were taken at my Stardust observatory during April 2018, with a Meade 10inch LX200 Schmidt Cassgrain telescope and a ZWO ASI120MC-S camera with a 2x Barlow lens attached; the conditions were excellent!

I have just returned from a wonderful trip to Norway to see the Northern Lights on board one of the Hurtigruten ships called the MS Nordkapp that sailed from Bergen to Kirkenes (top of Norway) and back to Bergen.
 
The scenery was just stunning but what I was so taken with was the lighting from the Sun, in Australia our sunlight is very strong but in Norway it was so soft and crisp, just so perfect for a photographer to take beautiful pictures.
 
Every time I took an image with the Sun in the picture it would softly flare with my lens, I really liked this, as with our Sun in Australia there is no way this would happen, as it would just saturate the sensor in the camera!
 
My main purpose for the trip was to capture the stunning Auroras which I successfully did, please see my Astro blogs for the dates of the 7th and 10th of March.  But I was also on the lookout for some of those special atmospheric phenomenon which you get in icy skies…. and yes, I’m happy to say I managed to capture some of these also.
 
One is of a Sun Pillar with the glorious colours of a sunset, the other is a full solar halo with sundogs, the other ones are of a beautiful soft Sun flare in an early afternoon sky (I know it’s a lens flare but its pretty).  And finally a sunset image from the Hertigruten ship with golden Sun glitters on the water.
 
What a beautiful country Norway is, hopefully I may visit this lovely land again in the future, it is such a shame that Australia is so far away, but it was worth the days of travel to get there :-)
 
All images were taken along the coastline of Norway with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens on the deck of the moving ship. 

~ Look out for interesting solar phenomena during the Day ~ 
 
I’m always on the lookout for optical atmospheric phenomena in the daytime sky that’s usually caused by light from the Sun reflecting and refracting on particles such as ice, dust, smoke ect, in our Earths atmosphere.
 
The four images above are some of the happenings viewed in very cold skies (-15 to -21 degrees Celsius) on my recent trip through the waterways and Fjords of Norway on board one of the Hurtigruten ship the MS Nordkapp.
 
Sun Pillar: I’ve only ever seen two of these in my life and this one had all the stunning pink, purple and orange colours of sunset.  It’s caused by a vertical shaft of light that extends upward and sometimes downward from the Sun, they are usually associated with thin, high-level cirrus and cirrostratus clouds that have horizontally hexagonal orientated plates of ice crystals…very pretty to see.
 
Solar Halo and Sundogs are also an ice crystal phenomena which are seen in the same sort of sky as Sun pillars but this time the ice crystals behave like prisms and mirrors refracting and reflecting the sunlight between there faces sending light in particular directions and producing the famous 22 degree halo around the Sun.  The sundogs on either side (real name parhelia) are also results of these shape ice crystals.
 
The sunset image with the golden glitters on the water, is another amazing image because all those tiny golden glitters are mini Suns reflected on the water, so next time you see these things take a photo.
Our world is such an incredible place with lots to see if only we take a bit more time to look!!!
Go on, see what you can find :-)
 
For further information about these incredible features in the sky please go to the websites below:
https://www.atoptics.co.uk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(optical_phenomenon)
https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/optical-phenomenon.html