I love this time of the year when the beautiful constellations of Taurus (The Bull) and the magnificent constellation of Orion (The Hunter) are now fully on show in our northern sky.  Taurus has two open star clusters, one is called the Pleiades and the other is called the Hyades, and both are really great to see in binoculars.
 
The Orion constellation is just full of superb deep sky objects like the Orion nebula and the Horsehead nebula…but this image is just a quite wide field shot showing the beauty of the area.  You will find an image I took of the stunning Horsehead Nebula in one of my last blogs at:
http://www.mystardustobservatory.com/astro-blog/-the-horsehead-nebula-in-the-constellation-of-orion
 
This is just one-15 second image of Orion and Taurus taken at Flanagan’s Reserve near Rathdowney in QLD…it just shows how much detail you can get with your camera on a tripod and a wide-angle lens. The yellow glow is from a small town called Boonah that’s not far away.
 
I used a Canon 700D with a Tonkina 10-16mm f2.8 lens set a F3.2 and at 11mm; exposure time was 15 seconds and ISO3200. This image is part of a 6-hour time-lapse to capture the rising and setting of Orion, which I will post later.

The clouds parted just long enough later this afternoon for me to take some images of the new sunspot group AR2629. The other sunspot area AR2628 has a shape that looks quite interesting…it reminds me of a little tadpole with that wispy tail coming away from its dark centre :-)
 
The first image is orientated with the western side of the Sun to the bottom which shows AR2628 and the eastern side to the top right which shows AR2629; the second full disc image is in the correct orientation.
 
Both images were taken with my APO 127mm refractor telescope with a glass solar filter attached and using a Canon 700D camera, the first image had a 2x Barlow attached and the second image showing the full solar disc was at prime focus. 

~ The Sun in H-alpha shows a huge solar prominence on the limb ~
 
When you look in a dedicated solar telescope at the Sun in the H-alpha wavelength you can sometimes see so much more incredible detail.
 
This is what happened when I decide to take off the white light refractor and have a look at the Sun with my solar telescope…to my surprise and delight there on the eastern limb was a large wedge shape prominence firing away out into space, not that far away from the new sunspot group AR2629.

I’ve sometimes noticed that when a large prominence is displayed like this on the eastern limb, that within a day or two a new sunspot group rotates into view.
​I wonder if this will happen again and we’ll have another new sunspot soon…
 
Images were taken with a Lunt 80mm solar telescope and a Canon 700d camera with a 2x Barlow lens; this is a composite image to capture the different exposures needed for the solar disc and the faint prominences. Exposures were 1/200th second and ISO200 for the solar disc and 1/15th second and ISO 200 for the prominences.

I was very excited to see a beautiful spouting prominence on the eastern edge of the Sun this morning (top left of image) that looked quite spectacular, there was also some of that giant cloud of plasma still ejecting out into space from the western limb.
 
It was very hard to capture and process the faint detail of the prominence on the western limb so I’ve coloured the outer edge to show the very faint wispy detail. (Click on image to enlarge for more detail)

Spaceweather.com website had an image of the event taken with NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on its front page on its site on the 23rdJanuary 2017.
​ http://www.spaceweather.com
https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov

The view through the 127mm refractor was also a lovely sight; with the large sunspot AR2628 quite dark on the solar surface AR 2627 which is still quite faint…

The H-alpha images were taken with my Lunt 60mm solar telescope and a Canon 700D camera with a 2x Barlow lens, exposures for solar disc were 1/200th second and ISO200. The settings for the prominences were exposures 1/15th second and ISO400, the images were combined and processed in PS CS4.

The pretty image of a waning crescent Moon was taken just after midnight on the 18th January 2017. With this phase you can see many of the lunar oceans and seas on the surface of the Moon.
 
To the lower left on the terminator line is the Sea of Serenity, which is quite dark and prominent. To the bottom of the Sea of Serenity you can see two mountainous areas know as the Apennines Mountains (Montes) and Caucasus Montes. The two mountain chains are separated by a mere 50kms, and this is where the area know as the Sea of Rains (Mare Imbrium) begins, then the huge area known as the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) wraps all around the lower right area of the Moon.
 
Before the use of telescopes, these areas on the lunar surface were believed to be seas and oceans because from Earth they looked large and dark and it was just natural for the astronomers to think that they were large bodies of water. But we now better now because the lunar surface is as dry as a bone!
 
To the top right you can see the very heavily cratered southern area of the lunar surface with the crater Tycho still quite prominent with its long ejected ray system.
 
Images was taken with a 127mm APO refractor telescope at prime focus, I used 10 images and stacked them into Registax6, exposure times were 1/400th second and ISO 400.

There back…after so many days with a perfectly unmarked solar surface, the sunspots are back.
​AR2625 & AR2626 are not very large but they may turn into something exciting in the next few days….

Images were taken on the 16th January 2017 with a 127mm refractor telescope and a Canon 700D camera at prime focus. The exposures were 1/1250th second and ISO 200, there were 10 images stacked in Registax6 and processed in PS CS4.

This week we have the Magic Millions Horse Event being held here on the Gold Coast, unbeknown to a lot of these entrepreneurs, there’s also a stunning horsey show going on in our heavens above :-)

You will find this remarkable dark nebula not far from the bright star Alnitak, which is one of the three stars that make up the belt of Orion…It’s a swirling cloud of dark gases and dust that looks like a horses head or the Loch Ness monster if you come from Scotland...
 
The dark shape is caused by thick dust blocking out the starlight from behind the nebula, 
​mainly from the bright star Sigma Orionis.
 
I’ve processed the nebula a bit differently this time by using one of the artistic filters in Photoshop (dry brush) to make the image look more like a painting…just something a bit different.
 
Image taken with a 80mm refractor telescope and a Canon 700D camera on top of a tracking LX200 10inch Meade telescope at my Stardust Observatory at Leyburn, there were 25x 7-minute subs and 10x 7-minute darks, ISO 1600.  Images were stacked in DSS and processed in PS CS4.

Since the beginning of the year (except for a tiny sunspot on the 3rd January) the Sun has been completely spotless…but that’s not to say its not been active. There have been quite a few large coronal holes opening up on its surface, which has produced some stunning auroras in the northern hemisphere.
 
If you visit the spaceweather.com website you can see all those beautiful images at:
http://www.spaceweather.com
 
As to this image that I’ve just posted onto my blog…I don’t know why I went out again in this heat wave to take another blank image of the Sun, but I just wanted to get one more image of its smooth unblemished surface before a sunspot marked its surface.
 
I took this image at 4pm yesterday afternoon while it was still 35 degrees Celsius here on the east coast of Australia with 100% humidity…. once I took the images I ran and jumped into our swimming pool to cool off…it was So HOT!!!
 
Images taken with a 127mm refractor telescope with a glass solar filter attached and a Canon 700D camera. There were 10 images stacked in Registak, exposures were 1/1000th second and ISO100.

This is the first clear night we’ve had this year for me to take some image of our Moon and it’s an eleven-day-old waxing gibbous, taken on the 10th January 2017. At the moment it's so hot here in Australia with daytime temperatures at 35 degrees Celsius and night time temperatures hovering around 25 degrees!
 
The ejecta material from the large craters Tycho, Copernicus & Kepler can be seen quite clearly at this phase, you can also see the very bright rim of the crater Aristarchus just coming into view on the terminator line in the full disc image below:

​Images were taken with an APO 127mm refractor telescope and a Canon 700D camera. For the close up image, a 2x barlow lens was used, but for the full disc I used the telescope at prime focus.
 
There were 10 images each stacked in Registax6 and processed in PS CS4, exposures for full lunar disc were 1/640th second and ISO200, for the close up with 2x Barlow lens, exposures 1/640th second and ISO400.