I just had to try and get an image of this huge circular filament on the surface of the Sun on the 25th November, we are still on our caravan trip in NSW so I set up my static tripod and put the Lunt 60mm solar scope on and tried to capture some images…it was very very hot!!!
 
I’m very happy to say that I managed to obtain a few images to stack, Spaceweather has supplied the information from the
Solar Dynamic Observatory stating that this huge feature is 280,000 km long…Wow!
 
All this activity is causing stunning auroras over the northern polar areas of Earth, please go to the Spaceweather.com to view some of the amazing images :-)
 
Image taken with a Lunt 60mm solar telescope and a Canon 700D camera fitted with a 2x barlow lens, 12 images stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS.

Images taken at Port Stephens NSW Australia

I love doing star trails around the south celestial pole (SCP) as they show that our Earth is rotating on its axis, they also show where you’ve taken the image on Earth by showing where the north or south celestial pole is positioned in the night sky.

This image was taken at a small country town called Bendemeer in NSW Australia, and its latitude was 30 degrees south of the equator, so the SCP was 30 degrees up from my southern horizon (if you live in the northern hemisphere you would be looking to the northern sky to find your NCP) :-)

The two fuzzy patches near the top of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, which are small companion galaxies to our Milky Way galaxy; they are circumpolar here in Australia so we always have them in the sky sometime during the night.

Above is an image of a 1-hour long single exposure, plus another in camera 1-hour dark frame exposure for noise reduction (2 hours) using a Canon 700D camera and a Canon 18-55mm lens set at 18mm and f3.5,
the ISO was 200.

The slideshow below is the same view as the Startrail plus a short exposure image of 75 seconds to show the star groups in the night sky, you can also see how far the sky has rotated in 1hour around the SCP. The LMC and SMC galaxies were prominent, along with some of the faint constellations of the southern sky called Mensa, Octans,
Apus and Chamaeleon.
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The images were taken on our caravan trip stop over at Bendemeer in NSW on the evening of the 21st November 2017 with a small crescent-waxing Moon in the sky.

It was another beautiful clear evening tonight to view the lovely crescent Moon which is now above Saturn in the western sky after sunset. I was also able to capture the light from the Earth on the lunar surface with just my camera and lens setup, this is called Earthshine and it’s very interesting to see.

For the close up image below, you have to play around with the settings in your camera a bit to capture the soft light of the Earthshine in the one shot, some astrophotographers take two images and merge them together, but I’ve just done the one image to show what it really looks like in the sky…

Both images were taken at Bendemeer in NSW with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens on a tripod, the first image was a 2 second exposure with the lens set at 70mm and ISO 800. With the Earthshine image I added a 2x converter to the Tamron lens which was set at 300mm making it a focal length of 960mm, the exposure was 1.6 seconds and ISO1600.

Whenever I go away on a trip, I always pack the camera gear needed to take images of the night sky, that way I’m always prepared if something happens!

We are at the moment on a caravan road trip travelling down on the New England Highway in country NSW, and I was hoping that this would give me a great opportunity to see some beautiful clear dark skies,
and tonight proved me right.

When I looked out into the western sky, there up in the sky was a very young crescent Moon low on the horizon and the very elusive planet Mercury with Saturn making a perfect triangle; it was just so pretty :-)

The image was taken on the 20th November with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400 lens set at 50mm, the exposure was 4 seconds and ISO800.

I just had to stop my car to take some pictures of the high cirrus cloud that covered the whole sky. There was a real battle going on high in the atmosphere above my head with these thin cirrus clouds being swept downwards by the wind shear into all these huge wispy shapes.

Humans have this amazing ability in their brain to try and find patterns in everyday things and it’s called Pareidolia, my version of this image looks like a ballerina sweeping close by the Sun…

I know it’s whimsical, but it’s just another one of those amazing thing that can be seen when looking for halos and sundogs up in the daytime sky :-)

Image taken with a Canon G15 camera, which was on manual focus, ISO 80 exposure 1/2000th second.