Caught tonight’s gorgeous Moon–Venus conjunction! A razor-thin waning crescent with earthshine softly lighting the dark side, and brilliant Venus shining just above. Always a treat when these two share the sky.

#astrophotography #moon #venus #conjunction #stargazing

The Arietids peak on June 10! 🌠🧪

This meteor shower lasts from May 29 until June 17, and is famously most visible during the daytime.

#Astronomy #MeteorShower #Space #Science #Astrophotography

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The robotic telescope's output from night two: the Lagoon & Triffid nebulae, the Swan & Eagle nebulae, and the Moon.

I did get an image of Sharpless 1 as well, but it's clear that would need a lot more time than the couple of hours I gave it to get a good image.

#Seestar #SeestarS30Pro #Astronomy #Astrophotography

And now I've tried solar observing mode with the included solar filter. The tiny scope isn't the ideal instrument for this kind of thing, but it does OK. Sunspots are clearly visible, and you can distinguish the umbra and penumbra of the larger ones.

#SeestarS30Pro #Seestar #Astrophotography #Astronomy

OK, there we go, the result of pointing the little robotic telescope at the Prawn Nebula for four hours.

It's kept all the data so I can try reprocessing this in Siril, but the automatic image processing has done a decent job.

#SeestarS30Pro #Seestar #Astrophotography #Astronomy

The Moon is now up so I got out my tripod & wedge, switched to equatorial mode, and picked an emission nebula as my next target so I could use the internal light pollution filter. I think I'll leave this running for a couple of hours and see what I get.

#SeestarS30Pro #Seestar #Astrophotography #Astronomy

A couple of quick galaxy snaps with the in-telescope automatic image processing. Not a bad start.

#Seestar #SeestarS30Pro #Astrophotography #Astronomy

We are installed in Kurrajong for the long weekend, just outside the worst of Sydney's light pollution, which means I get to open my birthday present a little early.

I plonked the little astromech on the balcony table, spent literally a couple of minutes setting it up,, and told it to start imaging the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy. For now I've just left all the settings in their default fully automatic modes and it was even easier than I expected to get it working.

I'll let it run for a bit, and then start tinkering.

#Astrophotography #SeestarS30Pro #Seestar #Astronomy #Astrodon

Star trails over the trees last night

#astrophotography #StarTrails #SeeStarS30Pro

Full moon was out last night, so the only way to go for broadband #astrophotography was to select a target far from the moon's position in the sky.

After a while you start going for odd subjects just 'cause they fit the FOV at your focal length, and here is how I ended up on this space blob, which seems to also go by the name NGC 4605. 🤷‍♂️

This fake image goes viral every few weeks. It shows the Prohodna cave in Bulgaria, which has two openings resembling eyes. There are many similar images showing fake views of the night sky through the holes, like the unrealistically large #Moon here. I've also seen versions where the Moon has been mirrored into an impossible view.

If you want to learn how to spot fake #astrophotography images, check out this article I wrote: eso.org/public/blog/csi-astron…

#astronomy #science #photography