The full Constellation of Leo (The Lion) in the Northern Sky with (M44) Beehive Star Cluster in Cancer and Coma Berenices Star Cluster. If you are in the northern hemisphere you will notice that we see Leo upside down…Hehe :-)
 
If you are in a very dark sky it’s quite amazing how much detail you can capture with just your DSLR camera and a wide field lens on a camera tripod.  Just open up the aperture as far as it will go and do about a 20 second exposure and up the ISO to about 2000 or more. (You will have to check the picture to make sure the stars are not trailing, if they are, then shorten the exposure time an up the ISO a little bit to capture the detail)
 
Image was taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens, with an exposure of 20 seconds and ISO2500.

​I’m out at our dark sky site at Leyburn where my Stardust Observatory is located and while checking to see if the sky was clearing, I looked back toward our caravan and saw the whole constellation of Orion setting in the western sky…the car and caravan looked perfect to take a photo :-)
 
The purple hue in the background sky is from the volcanic aerosols still lingering in the atmosphere from the Hung Tonga volcanic eruption from last January.
 
I could see there were some rolling dark clouds coming in from the east so I quickly took some wide field pictures around the sky with just my camera on a tripod. It’s quite amazing how much detail you can get with just a 20 second exposure in a really dark sky with no tracking!
 
Image was taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens, with an exposure of 20 seconds and ISO2500.

This was the beautiful view this evening at 6.20pm with the large open star cluster Hyades in Taurus going down in the pretty pink twilight sky in the west. I was hunting for planet Mercury that was near the Pleiades, but it was hidden further down on the horizon behind the treetops!

A little later at 6.35pm the Constellation of Orion was also following with still the pretty colours of purple and pink in the twilight sky. 

I have finally made it out to my Stardust Observatory for the May new Moon long weekend after many months of flooding rain here in Queensland.  I’ll post more images if I’m lucky enough to get a couple of clear nights of observing :-)
​
These two Images were taken with a Canon 70D camera and a 28-400mm lens on a camera tripod; the Hyades image was an exposure of 6 seconds and ISO640. The Orion image was an exposure time of 8 seconds and ISO2500; both are just a single image.

~ Gold Coast Libraries for 6 – 12 years old ~
 
~ Discover the planets in our Solar System ~
Southport Library  - Tuesday, 11th January 2022 at 2 - 3pm
Every planet in our Solar System is so incredibly different. How did NASA take all those amazing pictures of the planets and send them back to Earth for us to see? Come along to the library and lets discover how they did it!
 
~ Discover Our Amazing Moon ~
Burleigh Waters Library - Thursday, 13 January 2022, at 2 – 3pm
The Moon is our closest neighbour in space, how old is it, what is it made of and how does it light up our night sky?
Come to the library and lets discover all these things and how mankind is going back to the Moon and building a Moon base…Wow!
 
~ Discover and explore the night sky ~
Helensvale Library - Tuesday, 18 January 2022, at 2 – 3pm
Have you ever wondered why the stars are different colours, or where you can find the constellations in the night sky? How do you use a telescope and what will you see with a pair of binoculars? Come along to the library and see how to discover so many amazing things in the night sky from your own back garden.
 
Bookings are essential at:
https://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/libraries/Whats-on
 
Presented by Noeleen Lowndes, Southern Astronomical Society Member (Gold Coast)
https://sas.org.au

I really had everything against me in finding this comet, a very light twilight sky with lots of passing cloud, trees and hundreds of mosquitoes biting me!

Comet Leonard is very small and faint, I could not see it visually but picked it up with my camera…
​I’m so happy that I captured a picture :-)

First Image taken at 7.48pm with a Canon 70D camera and Canon 70-200mm lens @200mm, the exposure was 4 seconds and ISO500 set up on a camera tripod.

The second Image below was taken with same lens @70mm, ISO640 and 2 second exposure.

​To view other images being taken worldwide of the Comet Leonard please go to Spaceweather.com at: https://spaceweathergallery.com/index.php?title=leonard

~ My Stardust Observatory ~

​I’m just blown away by the rich star field in this part of the northern Milky Way in the constellation of Cygnus.
 
If I look out from my observatory at this part of the sky I can honestly say other than the bright stars of Cygnus you cannot see any of this beauty. But aim a camera in that direction and this is what you get…incredible!
 
Please note that here in Australia in the southern hemisphere we see the North America Nebula upside down so I’ve had to turn the image around, we really do live in the land down under :-)
 
My Stardust Observatory is situated in a very dark sky site at 28 degrees south latitude so Cygnus rises and sets very low above the northern horizon and I can only captured it in the months of September & October. To make matters a bit trickier there are tall gum trees and urban light from the city of Toowoomba in that direction.
 
During the new Moon weekends of September and October I concentrated on capturing some of these elusive northern sky objects with the North American Nebula and the Pelican Nebula being the first objects, other objects captured will follow soon…
 
(Information on the North America Nebula taken from page 811:
​Burnham’s Celestial Handbook by Robert Burnham Jr)
 
North America Nebula (NGC 7000) is a vast cloud of mixed nebulosity, dust and stars, named by Dr. Max Wolf, and considered one of the outstanding features of the northern Milky Way. It lies some 3 degrees east of Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus.
 
There main mass of the nebula has a mottled appearance, which in the region of the “Atlantic coast” develops into an amazing pattern of shreds and streamers of nebulosity, both bright and dark.
 
Still farther out in the “Atlantic” this same pattern reappears even more strikingly into the detached nebulous island IC 5047, of tern called the Pelican Nebula’.

To read and discover more about this amazing area of sky please go to an excellent article written by Sue French and published in Sky & Space October 2004 edition.
https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/uploads/DSW_Oct2004.pdf​

When you really want to take an image you’ll use any method you have,
can you guess how I took this picture?

I’m at our very dark sky site and all my cameras were busy taking deep sky images through the telescope in the observatory. I opened the observatory door and looked up to see Orion and Taurus rising in the eastern sky just before midnight…Wow! 

The only camera I had left to take a photo with was my point & shoot Canon G7x Mark 11, but I also needed a  camera tripod to steady the camera, and that was under the caravan bed where my husband was fast asleep…what to do???

I tried using a fence post in place of a tripod no good, then the rail on the observatory…no good again,
Aha, what about the bonnet of my husbands car, ‘Yay’ success!

With the added bonus that it looks like the stars are reflecting in water…when I showed this image to my husband he laughed and called the picture ‘Stars reflecting on Landcrusier Lake’ 

This is the first time I’ve ever taken a picture of the stars on a cars bonnet!
So the moral of the story is ‘Never Give Up’  :-)

Image taken with Canon G7x mark 11 camera on the manual setting with a 15 second exposure, ISO2000, aperture F2 and focal length 8.8mm.

More images taken at my observatory in October coming soon….

The Sun has these incredibly active sunspot groups on its surface numbered AR2866 & AR2868 with another sunspot developing not far away numbered AR2869.
The two smaller sunspots nearing the western limb are AR2863 & AR2865.
 
I’m at my Stardust Observatory this weekend and just had to take some images of these wonderful active regions on the solar surface  :-)

My image was taken with a Canon 70D camera & Canon 100-400mm lens with 2x teleconverter = 1280mm focal length with solar filter attached…. The exposure was 1/500th second and ISO100, 20 images were stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PSCS4.

Movie taken with my Canon 70D and Canon 100-400mm lens plus 2x teleconverter = Focal length 1280mm

I was out at my Stardust Observatory and even though it was a lovely clear sky all around me, when I went to take a photo of the setting Sun, there was this huge smoky band on the western horizon from a large bushfire. Within minutes the Sun was setting into the thick fiery atmosphere and being pulled into an egg shape!
 
I had to quickly take the solar filter off the lens to capture the Sun as it was disappearing into the thick smog; it went this amazing bright pink colour before it completely disappeared…it was very exciting. You can also just make out those two large sunspot groups AR2866 & AR2868 on the surface.

My images were taken on my last new moon weekend, with a Canon 70D camera & Canon 100-400mm lens with 2x teleconverter = 1280mm focal length with solar filter taken off the lens, the thick smoke acted as filter.
(This is the real hot pink colour of the Sun with no processing)

On the evening of the 10th September the 3 day old waxing crescent Moon came to within 4 degrees of Venus low in the western sky. With this phase of the Moon you can also see that wonderful celestial phenomenon called earthshine displayed on the lunar surface.
 
Earthshine is now well understood as sunlight from Earth’s clouds being reflected back onto the lunar surface producing this beautiful soft glow on the Moons unlit surface.
 
I post a lot of my images onto Dr Tony Phillips website called Spaceweather.com
​Dr Phillips has written an article call ‘What is the Da Vinci Glow?’ It’s a very interesting read, please go to the link below and see how Leonardo Da Vinci over 500 years ago worked out what earthshine really was :-)
https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2018/05/16/what-is-the-da-vinci-glow/
 
I found this really nice YouTube video by Dr John Mason from the Southern Downs Planetarium & Science Centre. Where he takes you outside into the garden to look at the Earthshine on the Moon and view the De Vinci Glow. His view on this night was very similar to what I have captured here with my image.

In this video Dr John Mason talks about the magnificent conjunction of the crescent moon and the brilliant planet Venus.