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

~ Amazing Auroras ~

The sky all around our ship just suddenly exploded into bright curtains of light last night with the most amazing pulsating auroras that were all over the sky.  I’ve never see anything like this in all my life, the huge twisting curtains of lights waved and danced all over the sky, it was a breathtaking experience that I will never forget…ever :-)

I’m currently on board the Hurtigruten’s ship MS Nordkapp in Norway and I knew that we were going to get a stream of plasma from the Sun from that coronal hole that had opened up a few days ago (thanks to the Spaceweather.com website) and our ship just happened to be at sea between Skjervoy and Tromso when it hit our atmosphere.
How incredible was that!!!

Images taken with a Canon 70D camera on a tripod and a cable release, exposures were for only 2.6 seconds because the aurora were so bright with,  ISO5000 and ISO6400, I used a Tokina 11-16mm wide field lens, set at 11mm and f2.8.
What an absolutely magnificent experience this has been!

Over the last couple of days we have had these incredible thunderstorms hit south east Queensland and experienced spectacular displays of lightning that blaze all over the sky accompanied by deafening cracks and booms of thunder…its all been so exciting to watch every evening :-)
 
The image above was taken on the 13th February with a Canon 70D camera and an 18-400mm Tamron lens set at 19mm on a tripod with a cable release. I just set the images to 5 second exposures and do continues shooting as there’s no way I could catch them any other way.  (ISO100)
 
The second image below was taken on the 11th February with the same camera and lens also set at 19mm, but the exposure was only 0.3 second as there was so much light in the sky from the lightning…it was awesome!

~ International day of women and girls in science celebration ~
​
STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics)
 
On Saturday the 10th February I was invited to be part of the Gold Coast City Libraries launch of Girls who STEAM at the Robina Library (Auditorium).
 
This was a dedicated program of workshops just for girls, with exclusive activities across the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics to inspire and unite girls aged 8 years and over in their passion for science. 
 
I was part of the hands on activities, provoking ideas, and pop-up science to excite the Girls in Science with over two hundred people coming along on the day.
 
A couple of top female scientists from Griffith University also came along to the event to inspire the girls with there talks and my astronomy and NASA space displays were very popular.
I really enjoyed the day and had a lot of fun with all the girls :-)
 
Explore STEAM programs:
http://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/library/steam-programs-11684.html

Sunspot AR2699 on the 9th February 2018
 
GROWING SUNSPOT: Sunspot AR2699 continues to grow, more than doubling in size since it appeared on Feb. 4th. This image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the sunspot as compared with the size of the Earth:
 
The sunspot has developed an unstable "beta-gamma" magnetic field that harbors energy for M-class solar flares.
​NOAA forecasters estimate a 15% chance of such explosions on Feb. 9th. Free: Solar Flare Alerts.
 
With two primary dark cores larger than Earth and a scattering of moon-sized magnetic condensations stretching more than 100,000 km across the surface of the sun, AR2699 is an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. 

Story Credit: http://www.spaceweather.com
Image Credit: SDO solar observatory at: https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov

My Image below was taken with a 127mm refractor telescope using a Canon 700D camera fitted and a 2x Barlow lens, a glass solar filter was attached to the front of the telescope lens for safe viewing and imaging of the Sun.
I also use a HEQ5 Pro mount for tracking.

Sunspots…Yay!
 
After so much time with a blank solar surface it’s exciting to see some detail on the Suns surface with this large active sunspot group :-)
 
My images were taken with a 127mm refractor telescope and a Canon 700D camera and a 2x barlow lens attached. A glass solar filter was fitted to the telescope lens for safe viewing and imaging of the Sun, 12 images were taken which were stacked in RegiStax6, the exposure times were 1/400th second and ISO400. 

I captured these pretty coloured coronas’ around the moon in the early hours of this morning
with just my camera and telephoto lens.
 
I’m trying to encourage people to not only look at the lunar eclipse tomorrow night, but also to try and capture some images themselves with their camera equipment even if there are some clouds in the sky.
 
We are so lucky here in Australia to see the whole event, that is, if the weather is kind to us :-)
 
Images taken on the 30th January 2018 with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens on a camera tripod, the corona image was a 5 second exposure @35mm, the ISO was 100. The cloudy image was a 6 second exposure @100mm and ISO100. The lunar image was a 1/160th second exposure @400mm and ISO100.

I set up my solar gear late this afternoon just to see if there was anything happening on the solar surface in the hydrogen-alpha wavelength and to my surprise there on the solar limb was a faint prominence detaching away from the Sun.
 
It was exciting to see some activity after such a long time of inactivity  :-)
 
I also took an image with just my camera and long focal length lens to capture the Sun in the visible light.
 
The H-alpha image above was taken with a Lunt LS60mm solar telescope and a Canon 700D camera with a 2x Barlow lens attached, I took two sets of images one for the solar disc and one set for the faint prominence and combined both images in PS.
​You have to do this because the faint prominence needs a longer exposure than the solar disc.
 
The ordinary image of the Sun below was taken with a Canon 70D camera and an 18-400mm Tamron lens with a 2x converter set at 400mm making a focal length of 1280mm. A glass solar filter was also attached to the front of the lens for safe viewing and imaging of the Sun.