~ My Stardust Observatory ~

​I’m just blown away by the rich star field in this part of the northern Milky Way in the constellation of Cygnus.
 
If I look out from my observatory at this part of the sky I can honestly say other than the bright stars of Cygnus you cannot see any of this beauty. But aim a camera in that direction and this is what you get…incredible!
 
Please note that here in Australia in the southern hemisphere we see the North America Nebula upside down so I’ve had to turn the image around, we really do live in the land down under :-)
 
My Stardust Observatory is situated in a very dark sky site at 28 degrees south latitude so Cygnus rises and sets very low above the northern horizon and I can only captured it in the months of September & October. To make matters a bit trickier there are tall gum trees and urban light from the city of Toowoomba in that direction.
 
During the new Moon weekends of September and October I concentrated on capturing some of these elusive northern sky objects with the North American Nebula and the Pelican Nebula being the first objects, other objects captured will follow soon…
 
(Information on the North America Nebula taken from page 811:
​Burnham’s Celestial Handbook by Robert Burnham Jr)
 
North America Nebula (NGC 7000) is a vast cloud of mixed nebulosity, dust and stars, named by Dr. Max Wolf, and considered one of the outstanding features of the northern Milky Way. It lies some 3 degrees east of Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus.
 
There main mass of the nebula has a mottled appearance, which in the region of the “Atlantic coast” develops into an amazing pattern of shreds and streamers of nebulosity, both bright and dark.
 
Still farther out in the “Atlantic” this same pattern reappears even more strikingly into the detached nebulous island IC 5047, of tern called the Pelican Nebula’.

To read and discover more about this amazing area of sky please go to an excellent article written by Sue French and published in Sky & Space October 2004 edition.
https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/uploads/DSW_Oct2004.pdf​

The sky conditions were not favourable here on the Gold Coast to view the lunar eclipse because of a large band of cloud on the eastern horizon. But to my surprise, not long after sunset I saw a pretty crescent eclipse Moon rising above the houses across our waterway…Yay!...We were going to see something after all : -))
 
I had already set up my Camera on a tripod in the hope the sky would clear (I’m always the eternal optimist) and this time I was rewarded!
 
But my hopes were dashed, when only after 5 minutes the partially eclipsed Moon vanished behind clouds and it stayed that way for at least an hour. By the time the eclipsed Moon was back in the sky it was at it’s full 97% coverage with that telltale orange red hue.
 
The sky conditions were very poor for taking images, but I did manage to capture a couple of pictures through the clouds, we were just so lucky to even have seen it at all : -)
 
This was not a full total eclipse of the Moon, as the Moon did not go fully into the earth’s shadow (Umbra) but it did have all the colours of a lunar eclipse, it was in reality a partial lunar eclipse.

My images were captured with a Canon 70D camera and a Tamron 18-400mm lens with a 2x teleconverter attached making a focal length 1280mm and the camera was on an ordinary camera tripod. The lunar eclipse photo had an exposure of 2 seconds and ISO 640, three images were captured and stacked in Registak6 a processed in PS CS4.

The rising eclipsed Moon disappeared behind the clouds at 6.30pm...Oh No :-o

A world map showing where the eclipse is visible at the time of greatest eclipse. Earlier parts of the eclipse are visible farther east, while later times are visible farther west.
​ Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

On November 19, 2021 (late evening of the 18th in some time zones), the Moon passes into the shadow of the Earth, creating a partial lunar eclipse so deep that it can reasonably be called almost total. 
​Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

A very severe thunderstorm hit us yesterday afternoon and went right over the top of our house with thunder and lighting :-0 Within minutes after it had passed I looked out the window to the east and saw this amazing storm cloud formation!
 
It looked like a snaking monster bellowing down from the sky with a large open mouth ready to devour anything in its way, to the left of this astounding looking cloud a rainbow developed and then disappeared within minutes.
 
I’m sure there are many cloud spotters out there that will know what type of cloud this may be, the closest that I can find is from the Cumulonimbus family…whatever type of cloud it was, it was quite astonishing :-)
 
Image taken on the 8th November 2021 with a Canon GX7 Mark 11 camera on manual focus, with an ISO125.