Here in the southern hemisphere we know that winter is on its way when we see the Southern Cross (Crux) and other celestial wonders riding high up in the southern sky at midnight.
 
I have an observatory at a place in western Queensland where we have extremely dark skies and I'm able to capture the beauty of our night sky with just a camera and wide field lens on top of a tracking telescope.
 
This image shows the pointers to the cross known as Alpha and Beta Centauri, then the Southern Cross (Crux) in its entirety and then the pretty pink nebulous stellar area around the star called Eta Carinae known as the Eta Carina Nebula.
 
This star is in the end throes of its stellar life and it’s pumping out astronomical amounts of gas (excuse the pun J) as it fights its gravitational battle, many astronomers worldwide are keeping a close eye on this star as its one that will eventually go Supernova!
 
At the bottom of the image is an unusual dark streak known as the Doodad nebula, I was very happy to have captured this funny named object too :-)
 
This image was taken at my Stardust Observatory on the 10th March 2019 with a Canon 70D camera and a 18-400mm Tamron lens set at 23mm and F4.5 (the image is slightly cropped).
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​There were 12 x 3 minutes images stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and ISO1600. The camera was being tracked on top of a larger telescope set up in the observatory.

I used my Meade LX200 10inch to track the camera piggybacked on top of the telescope which was at a very difficult angle (upside down) so it was a bit of back breaking work to focus the camera.
But it was worth it as I got the pictures :-)

The sky was perfectly clear last month at Leyburn at my Stardust Observatory to capture these pretty galaxies in the constellation of Leo.
 
This group of large spiral galaxies are about 35 million light-years away and are well seen even in quite a small telescope. You can find them by running a line of sight between the stars Regulus to Denebola, and closer to Denebola the galaxies are located between the stars Cherton, Theta Leonis and Iota Leonis.
 
If you would like to find out more about these galaxies in Leo please go to this excellent website
​ for Messier objects at:
https://www.messier-objects.com/leo-triplet/

The images were taken with a Meade 80mm refractor telescope and a Canon 70D camera, which was tracking on top of a Meade 10inch LX 200 telescope, 15x4 minute subs and 5x4 minute darks were captured
and stacked in DSS and processed in PS CS4 :-)

I’m at my Stardust Observatory at Leyburn this weekend taking images of the night sky. I was just about ready to go to bed when I looked out at the dawn sky and saw this magnificent view of the planets all aligned up the eastern horizon at 4.20am with the gorgeous colour of daylight.
 
It was still dark enough to see many stars including the constellation of Scorpius with the stars from the Milky Way just starting to fade, it was very beautiful to see and very tranquil after a whole night up taking pictures of galaxies :-)
 
I took the image with a Canon 70D camera and a Tokina 11-16mm wide lens @12mm on a camera tripod, ISO 800 with a 13-second exposure.
 
(Pictures of the Leo Triplet of galaxies coming soon when they are processed)

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.

I’m so excited because one of my beautiful aurora images titled ‘The Northern Lights in the Arctic Night’ has been chosen as a finalist in this years CWAS David Malin Awards astrophoto competition in the Nightscapes section, Wow, that's amazing :-)
 
What happens now is during the CWAS astrofest conference on the weekend of the 14th & 15th July, David Malin will introduce us all and our images and an overall winner will be announced in each section, to win a monetary voucher kindly donated by Canon Australia, along with lovely plaques and certificates.
 
But the most exciting thing about the whole competition is that all of our beautiful images will be professionally printed and framed to be display at the visitors centre at CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescopes in NSW for a whole year.
 
Then, another set of the images will tour the country and go to other observatories and museums, so many many people will see our images and wonder at the beauty of the night sky…how very exciting is all that!
 
Please go to the links below to see my Aurora image and also all the other finalist chosen this year, I’ll let you know soon how I went…. Noeleen :-)
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https://www.facebook.com/CWASDMA/
http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/astrofest/DMA/2018_shortlist/
https://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au

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.
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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 was at my Stardust observatory for a few days this past new Moon and took some beautiful wide field images of our dark southern skies. I was hoping to captured some images of the bright new nova in the constellation of Carina…and I’m so happy to say that I caught it :-)
 
This stunning area of the sky has many thousands of stars, but this new nova was very bright and stood out ever so clearly next to another pale yellow star near the Eta Carina nebula.
 
The All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae only discovered this Nova on The 20th March and I took this image on the 15th April when it has brightened quite considerably…it will be interesting to see what happens in the coming weeks!
 
I took the images on the 15th April 2018 with a Canon 70D camera and a Canon 70-200mm F2.8 lens with the ISO at 1600.  The camera was piggybacked on a tracking 10inch Meade LX200 telescope in the early hours of the 15th April 2018. There were ten 3-minute images with corresponding dark frames stacked in DSS and processed in PS CS3. The image presented has been cropped to show the Nova and the Eta Carina nebula.