~ Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) Planetary nebula in Aquarius 655 light years away ~
 
About 10,600 years ago a star like ours exploded and this is what it looks like today…awesome isn’t it, but there’s no need to worry as our life giving star still has 4.5 billion years to go!
 
The Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) was formed when a massive red giant star exploded, resulting in a white dwarf star forming at the nebula centre, expanding band of gases and dust can be seen surrounding the whole area as the star shed its outer layers into space.
 
The Helix Nebula is the closest planetary nebula to Earth and can be found very easily at the moment in a dark sky with binoculars or telescope in the constellation of Aquarius.
 
Image taken at my Stardust Observatory with Meade 10inch LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and Canon 6D Mark11 camera attached. 35X3 minute images captured with dark frames and ISO 2500, stacked in DSS and processed in PS.
 
German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding discovered the Helix Nebula in about 1824. It is estimated to be about 10,600 years old when the explosion was created and the star could have had planets, moons, comets and other celestial objects orbiting around it just like our Earth.
 
To read more about this spectacular celestial object please go to the links below:
https://theplanets.org/nebula-facts/helix-nebula/

 ~ International Astronomical Union (IAU) constellations ~
https://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations/

~ Antares, Rho Ophiuchi region and Blue Horsehead Nebula IC 4592 in Scorpius & Ophiuchus ~
 
The Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex is one of the nearest star forming regions to the Sun. It is composed of emission, reflection and dark nebulae; the brightest parts of the cloud complex include the nebulae IC 4604, IcC4603 and IC 4605.
 
IC 4604, also known, as the Rho Ophiuchi Nebula is a reflection nebula illuminated by the star Rho Ophiuchi itself, which is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer.
 
Antares is the alpha star in Scorpius, just one and a half degrees away from Antares is the globular star cluster M4.
 
Images taken with Canon 6D Mark 11 camera and Canon f2.8 70-200mm lens piggybacked on tracking telescope. Both images; subs 25x3 minutes darks 15x3 minutes, ISO2500. Stacked in DSS, processed in PS.

~ NGC 6334 Cats Paw & NGC 6357 Lobster Nebulae in a sea of stars in the tail of Scorpius ~
 
This is a wide field star rich image around the sting area of Scorpius near the bright stars Shaula and Lesath. The Cats Paw nebula is also know as the Bear Claw nebula and is an emission nebula about 50 light years across at a distance of 5,500 light years from Earth.
 
It is one of the nearest H II regions that’s a very active stellar nursery and it really does look like a Cats Paw stamped on the sky, I can also see a little hedgehog on his back smiling at me :-)
 
British astronomer John Herschel discovered the nebula in 1837 while observing the southern skies at Cape of Good Hope in South Africa using one of the largest telescopes available at the time.
 
The other nebula close by is NGC 6357 known as the Lobster Nebula or War and Peace nebula that is another emission nebula about 5,900 light years away, it hosts several massive young stars clusters and is a prominent star forming region with proto-stars embedded within the dark disks of gas.
 
Along with all the rich star and dust fields other stellar objects can also be seen, with the large M6 star cluster in the top left hand corner.
 
I’m really getting into discovering the Barnard dark nebulae embedded throughout the Milky Way and have marked a few on the Cats Paw image.
 
This image was taken at my Stardust Observatory in August 2023 using a Canon 6D Mark 11 camera with a Canon F2.8 70-200 lens attached. The camera was being attached to the top of a tracking Meade LX200 10inch telescope.

How exciting…there were a couple of very large and active prominences around the limb of the Sun late this afternoon, I just managed to capture them before the Sun went down :-)
 
The images were captured with a Lunt 60mm PT solar scope and a Canon 700D camera with a 2x Barlow lens attached. 25 images were captured one set for the solar disc and one set for the faint prominences and combined in PS CS4.

It was very exciting observing the Sun late yesterday afternoon, as there were some very large active prominences around the solar limb.
 
The one on the northern limb was very fine and looked like it may take off and detach, the other two on the western limb were starting to interact with one another and connect.
 
And to make it more interesting there was another very large active prominence showing itself on the eastern limb…There was also a lot flaring around those two large sunspots AR3296 & AR329 on the solar surface Wow, it’s all very exciting now as we head toward solar maximum!
 
The images were captured with a Lunt 60mm solar scope and a Canon 700D camera with a 2x Barlow lens attached. 20 images were captured one set for the solar disc and one set for the faint prominences and combined in PS CS4.

On the first day of May there were a few active prominences firing away around the limb of the sun with a nice little arch prominence to the south that was interesting to watch as it wavered in space.

​There was also some solar flare activity around those active sunspots with a new one coming into view on the eastern edge, now designated AR3293.
 
The images were captured with a Lunt 60mm solar scope and a Canon 700D camera with a 2x Barlow lens attached. 30 images were captured one set for the solar disc and one set for the faint prominences and combined in PS CS4.

It was all very exciting to get on a plane in Brisbane, fly to Perth and board a cruise ship just to get under the shadow of the Moon, I think Graham and I are now true eclipse chasers along with a couple of our fellow SAS members.
 
The ship provided plenty of excellent astronomy presentations from members of the Australian Society of Australia (ASA) but what we really wanted to see would happen on the morning of the 20th April if the weather stayed nice and clear. Kelly Beatty from Sky & Telescope was working with the Captain to find us a safe anchorage so the ship would be stable enough for all on board to view and take pictures of the event.
 
The Captain did a wonderful job of positioning the ship and anchored in the Exmouth Gulf just off the mainland, being on a moving surface did present its own set of problems, but excuse the pun…we were all in the same boat!
 
Cheesy brought along his telescope to image the event and spend days worrying about how he was going to take his images, but in the end he got some amazing photos of the eclipse. Belinda and Warren also set up on the ships deck not far away from me and got some awesome images.
 
You never know what’s going to happen on the day, I was all set up with my gear on the back deck and was really getting carried away with the atmosphere of the event. I left my setup a few times to go exploring to see what other people were doing, what I saw were so many families waiting patiently and excitingly to see the eclipse with all sorts of equipment to capture some pictures.
 
I came across sunlight breaking through tiny holes in the banisters of the ship that produced little crescent Suns on the deck, I also saw this weird shimmering effect in front of me just before totality and was so thrilled to be seeing what’s known as shadow bands, I took a small movie as it’s quite rare to capture, Yay!
 
I got back to my camera just a few minutes before totality and that’s when somebody called out look at the Moons shadow path!!! I looked behind me and saw this shadow race over us and across the water, it was so fast, when I looked back in front of me and up…there was this incredible diamond ring flash on the limb of the Sun it was just AMAZING! I was bedazzled by it and that’s when it happened…I looked down at my viewfinder and it was black, I thought I had knocked the camera and could not believe I could not see the Sun. (Oh dear!)
 
I picked up my little Canon G7X camera and took a picture and then another incredible diamond ring flashed and that was it, it was all over…only 58 seconds, but ‘Oh Boy’ it was just awesome, and I didn’t get any pictures of totality except the one with my point and shoot Canon camera!!!
 
I could not believe it, what I’d done in all the excitement was to forget to remove the solar filter off the lens :-o Cheesy was so excited he got the whole of totality through his telescope and Belinda got some awesome pictures as well, everyone was just so excited. Lynn a past member of SAS was also on board and she captured a lovely picture too.
 
I was very conflicted, on one hand I was so upset with myself, but on the other hand I saw and experienced the whole event with my eyes, but I can tell you 58 seconds goes so fast and it was worth every second of it :-)
 
Please see a photomontage of the solar event; I took photos every 10 minutes of the partials right up until the end of the eclipse. I’ve put in my one and only picture of totality that I took with the Canon point and shoot camera. My friends (including Tel) have offered to give me one of there images of totality which was very kind of them, but I’ve gone with my own image to let me know that sometimes things are just the way they are…. are we going overseas for the 2024 eclipse next year, you bet we are!
 
Please see a slideshow of my pictures from our adventure, would we go on board a cruise ship again for an eclipse…Yes, we definitely would, as it’s lots of fun and the atmosphere was just awesome!

~ The (Ha) Sun with solar filaments, sunspots and active prominences on 26th February 2023 ~
 
On the 25th February a magnetic filament connected to sunspot AR3229 near the northern limb of the sun erupted producing a reaction of events that could lead to a geomagnetic storm on Earth in the next couple of days. (Information from Spaceweather.com)
 
This is image of the Sun in (Ha) on the 26th February with some of that activity still present on the surface with prominences around the solar limb and some dark filaments on the surface.
 
There was also activity around AR 3234 to the north in the middle of the Sun and another area in the south AR 3236.
 
This image was taken with my Lunt 60mm solar telescope with a Canon 700D camera. The colour image is a composite with two sets of exposures to capture the disc and the faint prominences that were combined in PS; the exposures were 1/320th and ISO 100.

​The monochrome image was taken with an exposure of 1/200th and ISO800.

Credit: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory
https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov

There was a lot of high level cloud in the western sky late this afternoon when I took these images, I was so surprised to capture this much detail on the surface of the Sun.
 
There were many long filaments and the new sunspots AR 3214 & AR 3213 looked very active, there was also a nice prominence on the western limb.
 
Images taken with a Lunt (PT) 60mm solar telescope and a Canon 700D camera with a 2x Barlow lens attached. Twenty images were capture with an exposure of 1/200th second and ISO200.

​Images were stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS. Monochrome images, exposure time was 1/125th second and ISO800 with the same processing.