The moment when the message was received that the spacecraft had successfully flown by Ultima Thule!
​Alan Stern with a reporter who is the Principal Investigator for the mission.
(Screenshot image taken during the live broadcast with my mobile phone)

NASA does it again another first in the exploration of our Solar System for humankind :-)

On 1st January 2019 NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will flyby Ultima Thule!
 
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is about to make a flyby of the mysterious elongated object nicknamed Ultima Thule (Ultima thoo-lee) that is located at an incredible 1.6 billion kilometres beyond Pluto in the distant Kuiper Belt.
 
At around 3.30pm (AEST) on New Year day, New Horizons will swoop past Ultima Thule three times closer than it buzzed by Pluto in 2015. Because it takes ~6 hours for radio signals from the Kuiper Belt to reach Earth, first images will not be released to the public until Jan. 2nd.
 
The watch the live coverage of the event and find out more about this amazing mission to the outer reaches of our solar system please go to the mission website at:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(486958)_2014_MU69

The children had lots of fun at our Star Christmas Party, but before they could get stuck into the ‘Star’ themed party food I set them some work to do!
 
First of all they had to think about their favourite place in the solar system and imagine that Santa was going to visit that planet and then draw Santa flying through the solar system.
​ (Some of there lovely drawings are in the photomontage above)
 
Then we played pass the space parcel where Braxton was so excited to win the prize, then it was Party Time….WooHoo!!
 
I really enjoy my time with the children, they have such a wonderful time learning all about space, Merry Christmas to all the families and have a happy holiday, see you all in the New Year, Noeleen :-) 

SAS website at: http://sas.org.au

It was really a lovely evening for this year’s International Observe the Moon night with many families coming along to enjoy their first view of the Moon through our member’s telescopes. Bryan even arranged for the ISS to make a pass over, how cool was that :-)
 
For the first time, I decided to use my little ZWO ASI 120 MC-S one shot colour camera with the Meade 8inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope for a live view of the Moon. Then all I had to do was use the hand controller to slew up and down the terminator line to show people the different features on the lunar surface on the laptop…everyone really enjoyed this.
 
We had a 10-day-old Moon, so the large crater Copernicus was fully on show along with Gassendi crater which was right on the terminator line showing sunrise on the crater edge and sunlit mountain peaks inside the crater. A few people even used there smart phones to take pictures of the Moon from my cameras live view screen and laptop, which I’m sure went straight onto there Facebook pages.
 
Please see some pictures from the event including an image I took of the full disc of the 10-day-old Moon. By the time I got around to taking the Moons image through the telescope dew and light cloud had arrived, so the image isn’t perfect, 
​but we were very lucky indeed to have a clear night for InOMN 2018 :-)

~ International Space Station (ISS) Passover at 7.19pm on the 20th October 2018 during InOMN ~
​Images taken with a Canon 70D camera with a 10-17mm Tokina fisheye lens, movie made in windows moviemaker.

Please go to my NASA’s Saturn Observation Campaign education link to see and read all about another wonderful evening where we showed members of the public the beautiful planet Saturn and other celestial objects in the night sky…. it was awesome!
http://www.mystardustobservatory.com/nasas-saturn-observation-campaign.html

The golden sunset yesterday afternoon on North Stradbroke Island (Minjerribab) was just so beautiful. As the tide was coming in on the beach at Adder Point I was able to capture a pretty glitter path to the Sun, where you can see hundreds of little Suns reflected in the waves and on the water.
 
There are many ways to enjoy and capture our amazing Star the Sun :-)
 
Image was taken on the 27th August 2018 with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens set at 70mm and F11, the exposure time was 1/500th of a second and ISO 100.

To find out more about this beautiful island and its culture please go to the Queensland Governments website at:
https://www.npsr.qld.gov.au/parks/naree-budjong-djara/culture.html

We stayed a few nights in the beautiful Warrumbungle National Park in NSW where the world famous Siding Spring Observatory is located.  While camping in the park in a very cold -6 degrees, I managed to get some really lovely images of the night sky with just my camera and lenses on a tripod.

The sky was just so amazingly beautiful, diamonds in the sky beautiful :-)

This image is of the South Celestial Pole above the trees, to the right of the image that trailing smudge is associated with millions of stars in the Milky Way where  the Southern Cross (Crux) is going down to the west.

This is just a one image with an exposure time of 7314 seconds (2hours) which included another 2 hour in camera dark frame. I used a Canon 700D camera and a Sigma 10-20mm lens set at 11mm and f4.5, the ISO was 200 and the image was taken on the night of the 17th – 18th July 2018.

The night sky is a stargazer’s delight at the moment with the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars spread right across the evening sky on the ecliptic and the center of our Milky Way galaxy right in the middle of them…it looks so beautiful, you must go outside and have a look :-)
​
I took these images just two nights ago when the waxing crescent Moon had nearly set at the Warrumbungle National Park in NSW. I used a Canon 70D camera and a Tokina 10-16mm fisheye lens set at 11mm and f3.5. The exposure time was 20 seconds, and ISO 3200, five images were stacked in DSS and processed in PS.

I could see the brilliant planet Venus ever so clearly close to a new crescent Moon late this afternoon in a beautiful clear blue sky. Then later on as the sky became dark the elusive planet Mercury could be seen low on the western horizon. This was all happening in the constellation of Leo the Lion with its alpha star Regulus between the two planets, which also lies very close to the ecliptic.

Images were taken in the very dark skies at the Warrumbungle National Park in NSW with a Canon 70D camera on a tripod and using a Tamron 18-400mm lens.

For the day time image of the conjunction, the lens was set at 400mm, ISO 400 and exposure was 1/500th second.
For the evening image the lens was set at 35mm with a 1 second exposure and ISO1600.

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 :-)
​
https://www.facebook.com/CWASDMA/
http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/astrofest/DMA/2018_shortlist/
https://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au

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.