I had to hurry home to get some photos of this vibrate coloured rainbow late this afternoon…it was very pretty :-)
 
Images were taken with just my iPhone on automatic.
 
Information from the UK Met Office website at:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/optical-effects/rainbows/double-rainbows
 
How are double rainbows formed?
Double rainbows are formed when sunlight is reflected twice within a raindrop with the violet light that reaches the observer's eye coming from the higher raindrops and the red light from lower raindrops.
This means the sequence of colours is inverted compared to the primary rainbow, with the secondary bow appearing about 10 degrees above the primary bow.
 
Rainbows are refracted and reflected sunlight and are complicated:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/rbowpath.html
 
Rainbow Principles:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rainbow_principle.svg
​
https://old.atoptics.co.uk/rainbows/sec.htm
 
Now that was the science behind rainbows, but really, they are just a beautiful thing to see :-D

I had three perfect nights under the stars at my Stardust Observatory at Leyburn in early September 2024.
​This is a very dark sky site in western Queensland.
 
As I process the images I’ll post them onto my website beginning with capturing the faint Cat’s Paw and Lobster nebulae in the area around the sting of Scorpius.
 
At this time of the year Scorpius and Sagittarius and the whole band of the Milky Way is at the zenith, it gives you plenty of time to take lots of images.
 
For this weekend, I decided to do just wide field images of the Milky Way using a Canon 70D camera and Canon 70-200 f2.8 lens. The camera was attached to the tracking Meade 10inch telescope that was polar aligned in the observatory.
 
Most of the images were an exposure time of 2-3 minutes and ISO2000. I captured at least 20-30 frames and also corresponding dark frames for stacking. Images were stacked in Deep Sky Stacker (DSS) and processed in PS.
 
When looking at the star rich areas of the Milky Way you come across some very dark patches among the stars. I have since found out they are called Barnard Objects after a man called Edward E Barnard who saw them as ‘holes in the heavens’.
 
They are dark nebulae where so much interstellar gas and dust obscures the light from the stars that are behind it, it’s very similar to what you see with the Coalsack Nebula near the Southern Cross (Crux).
 
I have been coming across these objects when doing wide field images of the milky way for some time now and have been intrigued by them, so from now on I’ll try and number them on my images.
 
To find out more about these dark objects please go to the Harvard Education website link: Dark Markings in the Sky
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~agoodman/astro208/articles/Barnard.html
 
(Please note, unfortunately a lot of the links are now not in use, I’ve only included the link because it gives the general information)
 
This is another very useful and excellent website where you can download a chart to use with your images at:
https://exhibit-archive.library.gatech.edu/barnard/
​

~ Parade of planets in September 2024, Venus, Mars, Jupiter & Saturn with its moons Titan and Rhea  ~
(Planets to scale size)
 
September is the month for a parade of planets in the night sky, Venus is shinning brilliantly low in the west, Saturn is high up at the zenith and Jupiter and Mars are in the early morning sky.
 
I’ve made up a photomontage; the planets are real size in relation to one another as I used the same imaging setup for all objects. Venus was nearly a full phase but being very low in the sky there was a lot of turbulence.

​Mars was seen as a gibbous phase with a bright polar region but no distinct detail on surface as yet as it still too far away from us.
 
Saturn’s rings are now closing up, or I should say, the rings are nearly edge on as viewed from Earth, you can see two of the Saturnian moons Titan and Rhea in the image.
 
These images were taken at my Stardust Observatory on the first weekend in September; the sky conditions were not favourable as the atmosphere was very unsteady but I took the pictures anyway :-)
 
I used a 10inch Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, ZWO ASI120MC S Planetary camera with 3x Barlow lens attached. AVI movies were captured and stacked in Registak6 and processed in PS.

After taking images of all the planets with the Meade 10inch telescope, I attached my Canon 70D camera with a Canon 70-200mm f2.8 lens to the top of the telescope and tracked the night sky.

​I then took some wide field image of Saturn among the faint stars of Aquarius to show its position among the stars.
 
I’ve also added the image of Saturn that I took earlier in the evening through the telescope to show what you can see in the telescope…Saturn’s beautiful rings are now nearly edge on and will disappear next year as viewed from Earth.
 
This event only happens twice as Saturn orbits the Sun in its nearly 30-year orbit, so we only see the rings edge on every fourteen and a half years!