I was driving home late yesterday afternoon when I saw this pretty sunset with sunrays streaming up the western sky, these are known as crepuscular rays :-)
 
I quickly stopped my car by a park and took some pictures; it was then that I noticed the lovely shadow and iridescent clouds close by the Sun, which was hidden behind the dark clouds.
 
Crepuscular rays are an optical phenomenon caused by the light of the Sun being blocked by the dark gaps in the clouds, usually by stratocumulus clouds. The rays can only appear if there are enough particles (ice crystals) in the atmosphere to diverge the unshadowed shafts of sunlight from the setting sun, which scatters the sunlight.
 
Once again, another amazing thing to see in your daytime sky, keep looking out for all these wonders,
​you never know what you’ll see and kept your camera handy at all times :-)
 
Image taken with just my point and shoot Canon G15 camera,
the exposure setting was 1/2000th second and ISO 80. 

NASA invites you to come along on one of the hottest rides ever by sending your name to the Sun on board The Parker Solar Probe, all names will be on a microchip which will be placed on board the spacecraft during its amazing journey to the Sun.
 
The spacecraft is scheduled to launch on July 31 aboard a Delta IV rocket, but the launch window will be from July 31st to August 19th 2018 from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The Parker Solar Probe will provide new data on solar activity and make critical contributions to our ability to forecast major space-weather events that impact life on Earth. (This is so exciting because I love observing the Sun)

To find out more about this amazing mission to the Sun please go to the mission website at: http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/public-invited-to-come-aboard-nasa-s-first-mission-to-touch-the-sun
 
The spacecraft, designed and built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and managed by NASA, will fly around Venus seven times to get itself into orbit around the Sun in December 2024.

So what are you waiting for, this will be the closest you’ll ever get to our living Star, the Sun.
So have some fun and get yourself a ticket so your name can come along for the ride...I did :-)

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!

~ 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

I just had to try and get an image of this huge circular filament on the surface of the Sun on the 25th November, we are still on our caravan trip in NSW so I set up my static tripod and put the Lunt 60mm solar scope on and tried to capture some images…it was very very hot!!!
 
I’m very happy to say that I managed to obtain a few images to stack, Spaceweather has supplied the information from the
Solar Dynamic Observatory stating that this huge feature is 280,000 km long…Wow!
 
All this activity is causing stunning auroras over the northern polar areas of Earth, please go to the Spaceweather.com to view some of the amazing images :-)
 
Image taken with a Lunt 60mm solar telescope and a Canon 700D camera fitted with a 2x barlow lens, 12 images stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS.

Images taken at Port Stephens NSW Australia

I love doing star trails around the south celestial pole (SCP) as they show that our Earth is rotating on its axis, they also show where you’ve taken the image on Earth by showing where the north or south celestial pole is positioned in the night sky.

This image was taken at a small country town called Bendemeer in NSW Australia, and its latitude was 30 degrees south of the equator, so the SCP was 30 degrees up from my southern horizon (if you live in the northern hemisphere you would be looking to the northern sky to find your NCP) :-)

The two fuzzy patches near the top of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, which are small companion galaxies to our Milky Way galaxy; they are circumpolar here in Australia so we always have them in the sky sometime during the night.

Above is an image of a 1-hour long single exposure, plus another in camera 1-hour dark frame exposure for noise reduction (2 hours) using a Canon 700D camera and a Canon 18-55mm lens set at 18mm and f3.5,
the ISO was 200.

The slideshow below is the same view as the Startrail plus a short exposure image of 75 seconds to show the star groups in the night sky, you can also see how far the sky has rotated in 1hour around the SCP. The LMC and SMC galaxies were prominent, along with some of the faint constellations of the southern sky called Mensa, Octans,
Apus and Chamaeleon.
​
The images were taken on our caravan trip stop over at Bendemeer in NSW on the evening of the 21st November 2017 with a small crescent-waxing Moon in the sky.

It was another beautiful clear evening tonight to view the lovely crescent Moon which is now above Saturn in the western sky after sunset. I was also able to capture the light from the Earth on the lunar surface with just my camera and lens setup, this is called Earthshine and it’s very interesting to see.

For the close up image below, you have to play around with the settings in your camera a bit to capture the soft light of the Earthshine in the one shot, some astrophotographers take two images and merge them together, but I’ve just done the one image to show what it really looks like in the sky…

Both images were taken at Bendemeer in NSW with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens on a tripod, the first image was a 2 second exposure with the lens set at 70mm and ISO 800. With the Earthshine image I added a 2x converter to the Tamron lens which was set at 300mm making it a focal length of 960mm, the exposure was 1.6 seconds and ISO1600.

Whenever I go away on a trip, I always pack the camera gear needed to take images of the night sky, that way I’m always prepared if something happens!

We are at the moment on a caravan road trip travelling down on the New England Highway in country NSW, and I was hoping that this would give me a great opportunity to see some beautiful clear dark skies,
and tonight proved me right.

When I looked out into the western sky, there up in the sky was a very young crescent Moon low on the horizon and the very elusive planet Mercury with Saturn making a perfect triangle; it was just so pretty :-)

The image was taken on the 20th November with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400 lens set at 50mm, the exposure was 4 seconds and ISO800.