​The best time to view Saturn in the early evening sky this year will be at the time of opposition during the month of May, you can also see Saturn a lot earlier than this if you’re prepared to get up in the early hours of the morning.
 
At opposition, Saturn will be at its brightest and closest to us here on Earth because of the perfect alignment between the Sun, Earth and Saturn that are all in line on the same side of the Sun…that's why at opposition we see Saturn rise in the eastern sky at sunset and setting in the western sky at sunrise.
 
As the days and weeks go by after opposition, the Earth quickly moves along in its orbit around the Sun and leaves Saturn behind…but you have plenty of time to view this beautiful planet for the next couple of months in the evening sky :-)
 
My first images of Saturn this year were taken in the early hours of the morning during April at my Stardust Observatory. I observed that Saturn was shinning with its bright golden light among the arc of curved stars in the crown of Scorpius, Saturn was right next to the double star (Beta) Scorpii. …Which looked quite remarkable!

​~ Saturn in Scorpius ~
A quick wide field image to show where Saturn was in the Head of Scorpius on the 17th April 2015, 6x20 second images taken with a Canon 700D camera and Tokina 11-16mm lens @15mm ISO3200 and the image is cropped.
The second image is marked to show the outline of Scorpius (The Scorpion)

​To take the wide field images to show Saturn’s position in Scorpius, I attached my DSLR camera with a wide field lens on top of the tracking telescope and took some short exposures that I stacked together. 

Saturn’s rings are now nearly fully on show with the northern summer hemisphere on view, a perfect time to see the stunning rings of this beautiful planet in our solar system.​

​~ Beautiful Saturn ~
Image taken 17th April 2015 through My Meade LX200 10inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and an Orion Deep Space Video Camera with a 2x barlow lens, avi movie stacked in RegiStack 6 and lightly processed in PS CS4. 

There were two spectacular prominences around the solar limb today, a huge one on the eastern edge and another one on the western limb that erupted quite quickly and then faded…it was all very exciting to watch :-)

What is a solar prominence; it’s a huge eruption of plasma from the edge of the Sun that we can see as the Sun rotates on its axis and we are viewing it on the limb. Solar filaments on the face of the Sun are the same objects but viewed against the Suns surface.

(Warning…please never look at the Suns surface unless you have solar filters on your telescope and lenses or are using a dedicated solar telescope, if you do, you will do permanent damage to your precious eyes)

The H-alpha images were taken with a Lunt 80mm solar telescope and a Canon 700D. The images are a composite of two images, one to capture the solar disc and the other one to capture the faint prominences. The white light image was taken with a Meade 80mm refractor with a solar filter attached to the objective lens and is just one single image.

(Eastern limb is to the top and western limb is to the bottom in the H-alpha images as seen through the telescope)

On the 2nd of April all the children from the Stardust Junior Astronomy Club enjoyed a fun day at the library to celebrate our 4th Birthday. The Runaway Bay Library staff brought us a beautiful birthday cake and decorated the library with party decorations.

We played passed the parcel with some great space music and Thomas won the lucky space prize that was wrapped up with lots of paper.

The children then did an activity sheet on space where three of the best sheets were chosen to the delight of all, there space sheets are now proudly displayed in the library for everybody to see.

To my great surprise, I was presented with a lovely ‘Appreciation Certificate’ along with a beautiful bunch of flowers, chocolates and even a bottle of bubbly…thank you so much to all the library staff for this wonderful gesture :-)

Noeleen Lowndes (Coordinator of Stardust)