A severe thunderstorm hit the Gold Coast in Queensland on the afternoon of the 21st January and in only 35 minutes it went from a beautiful clear blue sky to a very threatening thunderstorm with high winds and torrential rainfall.
 
At 4.15pm I went outside and looked up and saw this strange cloud front racing in from the southern sky and within minutes it was right overhead. As I looked to the front of the cloud I could see this beautiful cloud shadow produced from the Sun being behind the clouds. When the cloud passed right above me I also saw these strange very dark wispy streaks fanning out from underneath the cloud system. (Not sure what was happening here)
 
Thunder was now being heard and the whole sky looked very dark and quite menacing indeed. I raced out to the front of my house, which faces east and to the water, and as you can see from my image above the whole sky was just so dark and threatening, everything outside was in a monotone colour…very eerie, then the thunderstorm hit with all its awesome power!
 
These types of severe thunderstorm clouds are called cumulonimbus and carry the most dangerous weather with them including very strong winds, large hail and torrential rain.

Please see a slideshow below of what happened in our sky in only just 35 minutes!

Australia is a very harsh country; over the last six months we’ve had one of the most severe droughts, with terrible bush fires, now flooding rains have started to arrive to give new life to our country.
 
Australian Bureau of Meteorology: What is a severe thunderstorm?

I’m always looking for atmospheric phenomena in the sky, but while away in our caravan over the holidays I was washing up the dishes and to my amazement saw this colourful corona in one of the glasses.
 
We have all seen coloured soap suds from an incoming light source but this is the first time I have ever seen this light so uniformed and concentric. There is a lot of science here just in this glass of soapsuds, just like when a corona is seen around the Sun or Moon it has to do with the Suns light.
 
But in this case the light from the sun is not being refracted through ice crystals,
​but interacting with the thin layer of soap film and producing this amazing effect right here in a glass.
I wonder what you will see next time you wash up the dishes :-)
 
The image was taken on the 18th January at Lennox Head in NSW with a Canon GX7 Mark11 camera, exposure 1/160th second and ISO 125.

I just love it when a large cumulus cloud covers the Sun and the Suns light filters through the gaps in the clouds and produces these awesome looking sunrays.
 
The best time to see them is when the sun is rising or setting in the sky, this one was taken at 5.20pm in the afternoon, so have a look next time the Sun is setting to see if you can see this very pretty phenomenon…and don’t forget to take a picture :-)
 
The image was taken with a Canon GX7 Mark ll camera with the lens set at 24mm (wide field) exposure time was 1/320th second and ISO200.
Please Note: It’s important to set the lens to the manual setting at (infinity)
​because these point and shoot cameras will not be able to auto focus on clouds.
 
To find out more on how these sunrays are produced please got to the link below:
https://www.atoptics.co.uk/atoptics/ray1.htm
This is an excellent website created by Les Cowley that has an enormous amount of different atmospheric objects that you can seen in the sky:
Atmospheric Optics:
https://www.atoptics.co.uk
 
~ Keep Looking Up ~
Because you’ll never know what you’ll find up there in our amazing sky :-)

This is what our skies are like here at the moment; the sky is full of dust and smoke from our severe drought out west and all the bushfires.  Our fire fighters are doing an incredible job of saving homes and many people are out helping our beautiful wildlife, which are also suffering in this 40C degree heat.
 
At last, thank goodness rain is forecast in the next couple of days, in the mean time it does make for some incredibly fiery sunset displays, even the water looks like it’s on fire!
 
Images were taken from Jabiru Island Park at Paradise Point with a Canon G7 X Mark 11 camera on manual focus; exposure was 1250th second and ISO125.

What a wonderful surprise I got today when I saw that my images of the planets Venus & Jupiter taken from a plane at 30,000 ft were showcased on the front page of Spaceweather.com 
https://www.spaceweather.com
https://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=157631
 
This is such an awesome website that is penned daily by Dr Tony Phillips, where current up to date information is given on the Sun-Earth environment with daily information about the Sun.  At least once or twice a day I check what’s happening in our sky and just love looking at all the images posted.
 
The added beauty of the website, is that people from all over the world can share there images of what’s happening in the daytime and night-time sky…it’s an incredible way to bring us all together on planet Earth by observing the natural wonders of the universe that we live in…

On the evening of the 16th November we boarded a plane for a flight from Christchurch in New Zealand to the Gold Coast in Australia.
 
What a wonderful surprise I got when I looked out my plane window and saw the beautiful colours of sunset in the evening sky with the brilliant planets Venus and Jupiter in the western sky with the constellation of Scorpius…it looked absolutely stunning!
 
When I wiggled around in my seat I also spied the constellation of the Southern Cross (Crux) with the pointers that was upside down in the south western sky, the colour gradient from a light blue sky to the inky black sky above the plane was quite breathtaking…
 
The images were taken with a Canon G7X Mark11 camera on manual focus and ISO 1600. To capture the images I had to put a jacket over my head to block out all the lights from the interior of the plane…I got many strange looks from the other passengers, but I just smiled and kept taking the pictures :-)

The bright stars Alpha and Beta Centauri, which are the pointers to the Cross, are also on display to the right.
What a glorious sight it was from my aeroplane window :-)

Boo!!!
Happy Halloween Everyone :-)
Spooky sunset image taken on board the cruise ship Pacific Aria on the 22nd October 2017.
Having fun with the Sun making it into a floating ghost :-))

Free to download, new posters from NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program feature horrifyingly inhospitable planets located outside our solar system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worlds/galaxy-of-horrors/

Just in time for Halloween, NASA has released two new posters celebrating some truly terrifying exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. Free to download, the entertaining posters recall vintage horror movie advertisements but have a decidedly astronomical focus.

​Dubbed Galaxy of Horrors, the fun but informative series resulted from a collaboration of scientists and artists and was produced by NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program Office, located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The same program is behind the popular Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster series, which imagines humans visiting some of the thousands of known worlds outside our solar system.

This was the stunning view late this afternoon which marked this special day for the  ‘Vernal Equinox’ here in the southern hemisphere, the whole western sky had these spectacular crepuscular rays right up to the zenith…absolutely beautiful :-)
 
Image taken at 5.17pm on the 23rd September 2019 with a Canon Gx7 Mark11 camera set on manual at focal length of 11mm, ISO 125 and exposure was 1/1250th second.

The colours in this sunset were just magnificent, it’s not very often you get to see such vibrate and vivid colours like this in the sky, and it was just stunning!
 
I quickly ran a grabbed my little Canon G15 point and shot camera and took some images, there’s no processing here, this is the real colour of the afternoon sky…just magnificent :-)
Exposure settings were aperture f2.8, ISO320 and time was 5.02pm.
 
What courses all these stunning colours?
 
At sunset the Suns light has a lot more of the Earths thick atmosphere to pass through as it sets low on the western horizon and depending on how much dust particles or other aerosols are in the sky this determines how colourful the sunset will become.
 
On the electromagnetic spectrum red has the longest wavelength of any visible light, this is why sunsets are often a beautiful golden yellow or red colour on the horizon, the extremely long path of sunlight as it travels or scatters through the atmosphere blocks all the other colours.
 
Below you will find a few websites that explain the science behind a beautiful sunset…but really they are just so beautiful so just enjoy them :-)
 
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/blue-sky/en/
 
http://media.bom.gov.au/social/blog/1767/red-sky-at-night-the-science-of-beautiful-sunsets/