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 :-)
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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 :-)
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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

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.

~ Very Bright Sundog in the Sky ~

​What a surprise I got when I came out of our local shopping centre, looked up and saw this incredible bright Sundog in the sky. It’s the most brightest and colourful one that I’ve ever seen!
 
I quickly grabbed my camera to take some photos; by this time many people were looking up at the sky and wondering what it was. I’m afraid I didn’t make it any easier for them to understand as I tried to explain that what they were looking at was called a Sundog…what a funny name that is one little boy said as he smiled up at me, I can only image what was going through his little mind :-)
 
My photos were taken with a Canon G15 camera with a 1/2000th second exposure and ISO80 with a 23mm focal length using manual focus.

If you would like to know more about these wonders in the sky please go to Les Cowley’s excellent website called Atmospheric Optics at: https://www.atoptics.co.uk/halosim.htm
And also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog

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.

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.