On the night of the 23rd June we were clouded out here on the Gold Coast but just after midnight the cloud started to part ever so slightly to show the Perigee Moon high up on the zenith. I ran inside and quickly grabbed my point and shoot Canon G15 camera and aimed it up at the sky and took some shots on auto.

Today I was ready to bin all the images when I came across this amazing shaped cloud cradling the Moon, if you look closely and use your imagination you can make out a face and outstretched arms holding the Moon.

I know this is whimsical but we all like to see shapes in the clouds and I thought you might like to see a different type of picture with this special Super Moon.

A Perigee Moon means that the Moon is closest to the Earth in its orbit around our planet. The Moon does not orbit the Earth in a perfect circle, its path is slightly elliptical and it can be as much as fifty thousand kilometres closer to Earth at this time. The next time the Moon will be this close at approximately 356,000 kilometres will be on the 10th August 2014, so you’ve got plenty of time to get ready for the next one :-))

Saturn is looking truly beautiful in a telescope at the moment and it’s wonderful to see the magnificent rings back on show again after so long.

My image was taken with a Meade LX200 10inch telescope and an Orion StarShoot Deep Space Video Camera fitted with a 2x Barlow lens on the 15th June 2013 at my observatory. There were 3146 video frames stacked and processed in Registax and further processed slightly in PS CS4.

This is the first time I’ve used this video camera to take an image of Saturn and I’m just thrilled with the result :-))
Image on Spaceweather.com