Yay! There’s a new sunspot on the Sun today for the New Year and it’s been designated AR2732, it’s quite small and faint but it may turn into something exciting for us solar observers :-)
 
Images taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm with a 2x teleconverter, a glass solar filter was attached to the lens for safe viewing and imaging of the solar surface. 10 images were stacked in RegiStak6 and lightly processed in PS CS4…Happy New Year to everyone!

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

We have had just a beautiful clear sunny day for Christmas Day after many weeks of stormy weather and it lasted out for the evening so I could take a picture of the Christmas Day Moon.
That was my plan and it worked out beautifully :-)
 
Image was taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm with a 2x telecoverter attached, the camera was on a static camera tripod and exposure time was only 1/400th second, ISO320.
 
~ Merry Christmas to everyone on planet Earth, Peace and Goodwill to you all ~

Christmas Day Sun Today :-)
Our beautiful Sun today on Christmas Day after weeks and weeks of rain and thunderstorms…Merry Christmas to all and happy holidays!
 
I just had to add a Santa hat to our very bland Sun for fun :-)
 
Image taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens with a 2x teleconverter attached, a glass solar filter was fitted to the lens for safe viewing and imaging. Exposure time was 1/500th second and ISO200.

~ Current information on the Sun ~
 
The Sun is now experiencing a period of solar minimum with over 200 days this year without sunspots on its surface, gone are the days when so much activity could be see on the surface of the Sun…I really miss all the excitement!
 
The image (left and above) of the Sun that I took on Christmas Day is completely bland and spotless!
​
To safely take images of the solar surface you must always use a solar filter on the lens of your camera or telescope. I haven’t even used my Lunt 60mm (Ha) solar telescope much this year as the Sun has been very quite in this H-alpha wavelength as well.
 
But there has been another type of activity on the Sun that’s quite intriguing, and that is these corona holes that open up and expel subatomic solar particles throughout the solar system. They are not as powerful as a CME but they still produce some awesome aurora when they hit our atmosphere.
 
When these solar particles hit the oxygen and nitrogen in our Earths atmosphere they excite the gases and release a photon of light that produces the coloured curtains of light of the auroras.
 
It was one of these incredible episodes that produced the stunning northern lights  (Aurora Borealis) that my husband and I witnessed in March 2018 when we were on board the Hutigruten ship called the Nordkapp that cruised up and down the Norwegian coastline. Wow…what a magical experience that was!!!!

~ The Northern Lights in the Arctic Night ~
My aurora image won a David Malin award this year in the Nightscapes section. If you go to the link you will see my picture and all the other stunning astronomy images that won awards this year at: https://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/astrofest/awards/

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 :-) 

You can still see the pale green colour of the comet even through all these clouds!
 
My Photo taken of the comet 46P in between clouds on the evening of the 18th December, the comet was still in the constellation of Taurus just under the open star cluster called the Pleiades (The Seven Sisters).
No other photos were taken after this date because of the cloudy weather :-(
 
~ Please see below the news release from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ~

​14th December 2018.
See a Passing Comet This Sunday
On Sunday, Dec. 16, the comet known as 46P/Wirtanen will make one of the 10 closest comet flybys of Earth in 70 years, and you may even be able to see it without a telescope.
 
Although the approach will be a distant 7.1 million miles (11.4 million kilometers, or 30 lunar distances) from Earth, it's still a fairly rare opportunity. "This will be the closest comet Wirtanen has come to Earth for centuries and the closest it will come to Earth for centuries," said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. What's more, Chodas said, "This could be one of the brightest comets in years, offering astronomers an important opportunity to study a comet up close with ground-based telescopes, both optical and radar."
 
Comet Wirtanen has already been visible in larger amateur telescopes, and while the brightness of comets is notoriously difficult to predict, there is the possibility that during its close approach comet Wirtanen could be visible with binoculars or to the naked eye.
 
Astronomer Carl Wirtanen discovered the comet in 1948 at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton in Santa Clara County, California. With a width of 0.7 miles (1.1 kilometers), 46P/Wirtanen orbits the Sun fairly quickly for a comet - once every 5.4 years - making it a short-period comet. (Long-period comets, on the other hand, have orbital periods greater than 200 years.) At the time of closest approach, the comet will appear to be located in the constellation Taurus close to the Pleiades.
 
Please find the link to this story at:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7306&utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nasajpl&utm_content=daily-20181214-1
​

At last, after all the cloudy weather we’ve been having I finally got to see Comet 46/P in the eastern sky
and I must say it was very very faint!
You could only just make it out in a pair of binoculars as a small fuzzy spot but it was good enough to find and point the camera at to take some pictures.
 
I must add that I do live in suburbia and the light pollution is pretty high…I’m sure if I could have got out to my Stardust Observatory in a dark sky it would have looked more spectacular!
 
I had to be quick as cloud started rolling in again so I grabbed my camera and tripod and started to take some images, by the time I took a couple of pictures the whole sky clouded over and that was that!!!
 
I was just really happy to be able to see it and actually take some photos :-)

Imaging information for the Comet:
For the wide field image above I used a Canon 70D camera and a Tokina 11-16mm lens @11mm and slightly cropped, with an exposure time of 15 seconds and set at f2.8, ISO1000.

The image below was taken with a Canon 70-200mm f2.8 lens @73mm and image was cropped.
​Exposure time was just 2.5 seconds and ISO6400 to capture the comet at such a short exposure.
 
I’m hoping it’s going to clear up enough to take some images on the 16th of December
​when the comet is closest to Earth…. here’s hoping for the best :-)

I was just heading upstairs to take a shower when I looked out the bedroom window and saw this beautiful dark orange Moon rising and being enveloped by dark clouds racing across its surface…. Wow, it looked stunning!
 
I ran as fast as I could downstairs to grab my camera and take some images before it disappeared, I only had time to hand hold the camera on top of the pool fence, but I managed to capture a couple of lovely images.
 
There is no processing here, the colour is real the only thing I did was crop the image. I used a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400 mm lens at 400mm, ISO400 and a 1/15th time exposure.
 
The Moon is just one day after full moon and the view is as seen from the Southern Hemisphere here in the land down under in Australia :-)

We had severe thunderstorms hit our area yesterday that not only sent the GC600 Supercar race in Surfers Paradise into utter chaos, but also produced some incredible weather!
 
First of all, it was nearly as dark as night in the afternoon when the storm hit with lightning and hail, then in the west it cleared enough for the light of the Sun to shine through in a small narrow band which produced this eerie bright light in the east which only lit up a path where the houses were across the waterway.
 
Then a glorious rainbow came out which was reflected in the water, then the whole sky turned a pretty salmon colour…it was all very exciting for me, but not so for all the racing car drivers and fans on the racetrack!
 
Images were taken on Sunday the 21st October 2018 with a Canon 70D camera and a 18-400mm Tamron lens with ISO 100 and mostly 1/100th second exposures.

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.