We weren’t treated to the thrill of any total eclipses—solar or lunar—in my part of the world in 2024, but I’m thankful we got to see the heavenly wonder that was Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). The last few weeks of September saw me waking up at 3:30 am to head to the beach and try to photograph the comet as it drew closer to the Sun. From mid-October, the fuzzy-looking traveller’s path positioned it to be visible after sunset. 

You’d be correct in saying I was keen to capture shots of the comet before it moved deeper into our solar system and out of view of all but the best telescopes. On the night I captured today’s posted image, I drove a 450 km (280 mi) round-trip away from the lights of my big city, with my camera ready to snap as many shots as possible. A few patches of high cloud disturbed my view, but not too much that the comet was obscured. 

The title for today’s post is courtesy of my wife. When I showed her the photo, those were the things she thought this stark, concrete building could have been. It’s a weather radar tower, one of several that provides data for mapping and predicting precipitation around my city of Sydney, Australia. Whatever you think the building could be, I reckon it looks pretty ugly!

The Milky Way’s galactic core was moving down the sky towards its setting for the night, partially blocked from view by the tower’s radome. Flanking the brutalist structure is the brilliant white orb of Venus on the left and the wispy white streak of Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) to the right.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any night sky photos, but I’m back today, bringing you an image packed to the gills with heavenly wonders. Captured in one of the wind farm areas near Goulburn, Australia, on Sunday, October 20th 2024, my photo includes a few features you can see throughout any year and one that might never again be seen from Earth.

The majestic central region of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, extends across the top half of the scene. I was happy to capture so much detail in this part of the sky, considering that astronomical twilight had yet to end. Venus is the planet in our solar system that reflects the highest amount of sunlight, and you can see it living up to that accolade in the bottom left-hand corner of this image, looking very white, bright, and large.  Caused by sunlight reflecting off dust particles in the solar system, the Zodiacal Light is responsible for how bright the sky is from the area between the two wind turbines and stretching up to include Venus, the orange star Antares, and touching on the band of the Milky Way. 

For me, though, the best object featured in my photo is the beautiful and mystical comet—officially named “Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS)”—showing itself as a glistening white streak over in the bottom-right of the frame. Originally calculated as having an orbital period of 80000 years, later observations suggest the possibility that this traveller might never return to our region of space.

I know that’s a tongue-twisting title, but they are the two items of interest in my photo today—the Chinese Tiangong Space Station and the head and long-stretching tail of Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). Sunlight reflecting off the space station scribed an arc on the sky as it moved from the top-right to the bottom-left of the scene at Oak Park Beach in Cronulla, Australia.

The beautiful—but much fainter—tail of Tsuchinshan-ATLAS stretches up toward the left from the comet’s head, not far above the clouds at about 2/3 of the way across the image and fading into the brightening sky as it crosses the space station’s path. In less than a week from now, we should be treated to the sight of the comet as it appears in the evening sky, not long after sunset. 

My post today is a “star-trails” image showing the movement of the stars around the South Celestial Pole over three hours. As you probably know, our planet Earth rotates on its axis once per day, making the sun and moon appear to rise in the east and set in the west. The same thing happens to the stars each night—as the hours pass, stars seem to move across the sky. If you mount your camera on a tripod, face it towards the point in the sky over due south or due north (depending on which hemisphere you live in) and leave the shutter open for a while, you can capture this movement. 

I shot the 494 images that make up the final image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/4.0, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 1600.

I shot this photo of That Comet on Tuesday morning at Elouera Beach, Cronulla, Australia. I’m calling it “That Comet” because typing “Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS)” all the time is too much. Also, someone will ask me how to pronounce the name, and saying “That Comet” is much easier.

I captured this image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens zoomed to 161 mm @ f/5.6, using an exposure time of 1.0 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Last week, one of our city’s TV news channels talked about how many people were at the beaches, “viewing tonight’s rare astronomical event,” the supermoon. Sure, it’s so rare that there are four supermoons in 2024! Still, it makes me happy when more people take the time to look at the wonders in our night skies.

I wasn’t thinking about the next night’s event when I shuffled my camera, tripod and 500 mm zoom lens onto our balcony last Tuesday to photograph the 99.2%-full moon. The yellowish orb looked enchanting as it rose, so I shot several frames to process by “stacking”, to get a final image with more detail visible. After processing the photos, I found I’d also caught Saturn, the mighty ringed planet, in my shot. The sky was still bright as the sun hadn’t yet set, so Saturn’s not looking very sharp or bright in the image, but it’s there!

This image of the moon and Saturn was created from sixteen single-frame photos, each taken with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera through a Sigma 50-500 mm f/5.6 lens @ 500 mm @ f/8.0, using an exposure time of 1/100 second @ ISO 200.

I shot this image in early June 2024, a little after midnight. I’d spent the hours since astronomical twilight looking for a location to shoot the Milky Way as it climbed up the eastern sky over the Eurobodalla region on the southeast coast of Australia but was thwarted by fog or clouds at almost every spot I visited. With midnight and the pending vertical orientation of the Milky Way approaching, I stopped at this little wharf at Narooma, which I’d scouted out on a previous visit. 

Surprisingly, this vertical panorama turned out quite well (imho), considering how quickly I set up my camera, tripod, panoramic head, and LED lamps once I arrived. The alignment of the Milky Way’s southern end with the wharf’s vanishing point was a remarkable coincidence of nature, for which I’m grateful.

I shot eleven images to create this panorama. Two of those shots were of the same field of view; one focussed on the nearby railing and the other on the distant island and Milky Way. After blending those two photos in Photoshop, all ten frames were stitched to create the vertical scene I’m presenting today. Each of the eleven images was captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Be the moon and inspire people, even when you’re far from full  — Kamilla Tolnø It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon  — Galileo Galilei The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to  — Carl Sandburg My photo of the 10% illuminated moon is a single-frame image, taken with my Canon EOS 7D camera, a Sigma 50-500 mm f/5.6 lens @ 500 mm @ f/9.0; using an exposure time of 1/20 second @ ISO 200.

I've seen the International Space Station (ISS) move across the dusk or night-time sky dozens (hundreds?) of times. Despite all those sightings, I still get a spooky feeling when the ISS appears out of a hazy horizon to begin a pass of my location. 

Last Sunday night, 1st September 2024, I got that spooky feeling again as the reflected light of the ISS started moving slowly up from the southwest horizon at Bodalla, Australia, where I’d positioned my camera so the bare limbs of a dead tree would break the ISS’s trail. The space station orbits our planet at about 28,000 km/h (17,500 mph), but its glide across the western sky was so slow that I had to take nine twenty-second-long exposures to create the composite image I’m posting today.

Each of those nine frames was captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 3200. I blended the single frames in Adobe Photoshop after editing in Lightroom.

Not long after arriving at my photo spot at Bodalla, NSW, Australia last night (1st September), I clicked off a test shot for a star trails session I was about to run and while the shutter was open, boom!

This is the brightest and longest-lived fireball I’ve ever seen. If you look at the trail you can see the meteor started off an orange colour, then burst into the bright green before changing back to orange as it faded.

Captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Spotting the Dark Emu in the Australian night skies comes easily for me now, but my brain wouldn’t cooperate for many years despite several people trying to show me the big bird’s outline in the Milky Way. 

Australian Aboriginal traditions retain at least two origin stories explaining how the Dark Emu came to be at home in the heavens. In addition to this lore, the Dark Emu was important to our indigenous peoples in providing food, with the bird’s position at night in particular seasons of each year indicating when the harvesting of emu eggs would be viable. 

I still smile in wonder with each nocturnal sighting, happy that I have at least this small link to my country’s first and most ancient inhabitants. Seeing the shape stretching downwards, behind, or above the Southern Cross is a treat! To create this image of the Dark Emu, I shot sixteen single-frame photos, each with an exposure time of 15 seconds and an aperture value of f/2.2. My Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera was fitted with a Rokinon 24 mm lens for these photos. I stacked the images to reduce digital noise using Starry Landscape Stacker.

No, I wasn’t looking for trolls under the bridge when I shot this scene early in June this year! The Milky Way’s core had crossed the meridian for the night and was on its way down the sky to the western horizon, but still riding over the superstructure as I lurked below with my camera and tripod.

I’d already snapped a few shots, with the underside of the bridge lit up by my Lumecube LED lamps, when I heard a vehicle approaching from the south. The car’s headlights did a fine job illuminating the metalwork, but their beams left most of the foreground in shadow, so I blended two differently-lit frames in Photoshop to create what I’m posting here today.

Both photos comprising this image were shot with mainly the same settings: a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 25 seconds. The photo with the bridge lit by the car was taken at ISO 3200, and the other image at ISO 6400.

Sunday night, the 4th of August, I lamented on Facebook that it was just my luck to have auroral activity being forecast on a night that was predicted to have solid cloud cover for all of my state of New South Wales. This was the last of a four-night stay at Tuross Head on the southeast coast of Australia. Giving up hope, I went to bed early to try to catch up on the sleep I’d sacrificed for an eight-hour photo session two nights prior.

Checking my phone after a nature call at 1:00 am, I saw posts from photographers further south than me who were still out capturing the promised Aurora Australis outburst. Ignoring my bed’s beckonings, I rugged up and drove to the nearby “One Tree Hill” location. Looking to the west, I could see a portion of the Milky Way’s core region peeking out from the clouds, so I hoped that there might be other clear spots. Facing south, I could see that between the clouds things looked brighter than in the other parts of the sky. A few test frames later, I was hammering my camera’s shutter button as I snapped as many photos of the aurora as possible. 

The pink hues backlighting the clouds and reflecting off the ocean look pretty spectacular, I think!

I shot this twelve-frame panorama on my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, using a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.4 and an exposure time of 8.0 seconds per frame @ ISO 6400.

What a treat it was to photograph the sky last Friday night or, I should say, early Saturday morning. I captured this shot of the Milky Way and its reflection in the Tuross River (New South Wales, Australia) sometime around 2:30 a.m. at my fourth and final location for the night. 

Despite the water flowing quickly due to the outgoing tide, its surface was almost mirror-perfect, with only a thin layer of fog to slightly blur my view. I’d love it if our eyes could see the beauty of the night sky’s colours like my camera can capture these scenes, but I’m grateful for the chance to freeze a beautiful moment in time, see it via a screen, and pass it on to you.

I shot this single-image photo with my Canon EOS 6D camera and a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I love my long car trips to capture nightscape photos in locations with what I consider “dark” skies, but sometimes, it’s more practical to visit a spot closer to home and make the most of the situation.

Last Friday night, July 26th, I settled for a thirty-minute drive to the cemetery in Helensburgh, Australia. The cemetery is located about halfway between my state’s largest and third-largest cities and receives lots of light pollution blazing from the north and south. The blue hue in the sky is due to that light pollution, which overwhelmed any of the colours I normally capture, created by atmospheric airglow. 

Despite those circumstances, I managed to tease plenty of Milky Way detail out of this nine-frame vertical panorama, which was shot with a Canon EOS 6D camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 13 seconds per frame @ ISO 3200. I mounted the camera on my Nodal Ninja 3 panoramic head, which I’ve had for ten years as of this month.

As black as the night sky might seem, plenty of colour shines in the heavens. Caused by charged particles emitted from the Sun interacting with various atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, this “airglow” is easy to see in photos taken with digital cameras, including smartphones. 

Green was the dominant airglow shade when I shot this vertical panorama of the Milky Way rising over the Tasman Sea at Gerroa, Australia, in April 2024. As well as the stars and airglow in the sky, you can see the lights from a fishing trawler peeking over the distant horizon. 

I shot seven overlapping frames to create the final image I’m posting here, using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.0, with an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 3200.

After eight frustrating months, I’m finally bringing you my nightscape photos again! I hope to inspire you with the beauty my camera and I see in the Australian night skies. 

Shot on June 30, 2024, near Tuross Head, Australia, this five-frame panoramic image captures the Milky Way’s galactic core, climbing the sky over a lonely eucalyptus tree that seems to be reaching up to touch the stars.

I captured the five images that comprise this panorama using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

While I was enjoying my time photographing the wonderful night I was afforded in mid-November this year near Harden, NSW, Australia, many of the local farmers were occupied with their wheat harvest. The lights of one of the massive pieces of agricultural machinery pointed in my direction as I took this photo of the Milky Way’s galactic core edging closer to the horizon.

The inherent haziness of the sky in the space between the horizon and roughly ten degrees above it made it impossible to get a sharp and detailed image of our galaxy’s dust lanes and dark nebulae. Still, I’m happy with how the overall scene looks.

This photo is a single-frame image, shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Where else would you find cows but in the Milky Way? This pile of three cows marked the entrance to the Romani Pastoral Company’s property near Harden, NSW, Australia and seemed happy to pose for my photos while the Milky Way set behind them. Contented cows, you might say!

The Milky Way has a yellow/brown tint in this photograph, caused by the refraction of light by the Earth’s atmosphere, in the same way the moon looks yellowed when you see it close to the horizon. I was happy to get this end-of-season image of the Milky Way, having driven for over four hours to reach the location. I’m fortunate to live in this part of the world, where we can see and photograph the Milky Way’s core region from partway through January until almost the end of November each year.

I shot eighteen stacked frames using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera fitted with a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens to create the image I’m offering you today. For each of those shots, I opened the lens to f/2.5 and used an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

This abandoned building is tagged on Google Maps as “Cullinga Hall/School?” So far, I’ve not found any further details of the building’s history, but it’s a very photogenic structure that posed nicely for me when I visited last Monday night, 13th November. Located in the Riverina District of New South Wales, Australia, the old hall isn’t far from the towns of Wallendbeen and Cootamundra, in an area that farms wheat, canola, cereal crops, sheep, wool, fat lambs and cattle.

The Large Magellanic Cloud was prominent in the sky, seen here at the top-right corner of my photo. The second-brightest star visible in our planet’s night skies, Canopus, was sending forth its photons and appears here down the centreline of the shot. Atmospheric airglow tinted the sky a lovely green hue, which looks like a colourful canvas sprinkled with stars, even though the stars are much further away in space.

I captured this shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400, and I lit the foreground with two Lume Cube LED lamps.

I shot today’s photo last Monday night, 13th November, at 9:05 pm, seventeen minutes before the beginning of astronomical twilight*. Shooting then meant there was still sunlight refracting in the Earth’s atmosphere to make the sky bright enough to silhouette the horizon but not so much that the stars, dust and gas formations in the Milky Way couldn’t be seen. I planned to shoot this scene with the windmill being much more prominent in the foreground, but a barbed wire fence, lots of long and spiky grass and wheat, and a drainage ditch kept me from getting close enough to the structure to do so.

* Did you know there are three twilight periods, both after the Sun sets and before it rises? At sunset, “Civil twilight” begins, and the sky gradually darkens but is still bright enough for us to see without artificial lights such as headlights, streetlights, etc. Astronomers regard civil twilight as when the Sun is just below the horizon to when its centre is six degrees below the horizon.

“Nautical twilight” occurs when the Sun is between six and twelve degrees below the horizon following sunset or between twelve and six degrees below the horizon before sunrise. “Astronomical twilight”–my favourite kind of twilight–begins when the Sun is from twelve to eighteen degrees below the horizon after sunset or between eighteen and twelve degrees before sunrise.

Captured north of Young, NSW, Australia, I shot this scene with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 3200.

I’ve been wowed by the hundreds (thousands, more likely) of photos online in the past few days, showing the beauty of the major auroral event last Sunday night, 5/6 November. As per most Sunday nights, I was at home in Australia’s largest capital city, Sydney, with no view to the south and lots of light pollution, so I missed out on the skyborne light show. My photo today isn’t, sadly, from that auroral display. My shot was taken during a similar event in April of 2023. Call me an imposter for jumping on the Aurora bandwagon, but I had no other images to post. I captured this scene at the Blue Pool, one of the tourist attractions of Bermagui, on the southeast coast of Australia. The photo is a single exposure, shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/4.0, using an exposure time of 5 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The Murrumbidgee River flows for around 1485 km (923 mi) and is the second-longest river in Australia. I photographed the starry southern sky over and reflected in the river from the northern approach of the Taemas Bridge, about 40 km (25 mi) northwest of Australia’s capital, Canberra, on a night in mid-June of 2023.

Looking across the river in my photo, you can see the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds–satellite galaxies of our Milky Way–hanging listlessly over the rolling hills, with the larger of the two “clouds” reflected in the Murrumbidgee below. Also reflected in the water is Canopus, the second-brightest star visible in the Earth’s night skies, and a scattering of other stars from this region of the heavenly sphere. I hope to return to the bridge in 2024 and try to capture a “Milky Way arch” panorama.

The shallow, dark waters pooled at the top of Carrington Falls, Australia, reflected the light emanating from the Eta Carinae region of the Milky Way, stretching upwards, as I photographed this scene in early September of 2023. Despite being a very popular hiking and picnic location, I had the hooting of owls, the rippling of the pools and the distant crashing of the waterfall to myself this Saturday night.

Since I didn’t have my panoramic tripod head with me, I resorted to first principles, using my camera and a standard tripod, plus good old dead reckoning to ensure I had good overlap between the nine frames that make up this vertical panorama. In the end, I misaligned things and came close to missing out on the lovely circle of stars near the bright-orange star Antares at the right-hand edge of the frame, but I’m pleased with the final result.

In mid-September this year, I ventured south to Gerroa, a lovely coastal location here in Australia, for what looks to have been my final Milky Way core photo session for 2023. The rock platform surrounding the headland at Gerroa has fascinating features that draw amateur and professional geologists and fossil hunters by day and keen nightscape photographers in the darker hours. You can see some of the tessellated features in the shallow rock pools that the rising tide filled during my time there.

At this time each year, you can photograph the Milky Way as it sinks towards the southwestern horizon, forming the arched shape I captured in this 55-frame panorama. Although the distant towns of Berry and Nowra are much smaller than the metropolitan areas of Kiama, Wollongong and Sydney to their north, they still pump out plenty of stray illumination in all directions, as you can see from the bright and white “light domes” along the distant horizon. The location is a 110 km (68 mi) drive from my home in Sydney but still far enough from civilisation to avoid such light pollution.

I shot the frames that make up the panorama using my Canon EOS 6D Mk I camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

My nightscape photography expeditions have been less frequent than I’d hoped for this year. With the Milky Way’s core almost gone until early 2024, this image I captured in mid-September might be my last shot of this part of the sky for 2023.

The starry band of the Milky Way was hanging over the top of the landform known as Black Head at Gerroa, Australia when I captured this 30-frame stacked image. I lit the cliff face with two Lume Cube LED lamps, and light spilling from the town of Nowra—23 km (14.3 mi) distant—was responsible for the backlighting of Coolangatta Mountain, at the bottom left of the scene and the waters of Berry’s Bay in between.

Today’s post is from a visit to Carrington Falls, in the Southern Highlands region of my state of New South Wales, Australia, early in September.

The Milky Way was moving towards being parallel with the southwestern horizon when I captured this three-frame vertical panoramic image at the top of the falls. Not far past the rocks and flowing pool in the photo’s foreground, the waters of the Kangaroo River reach the edge of the escarpment and plunge 160 metres (520 ft) to the valley floor below. On the horizon, you can see the distant glow of the town of Marulan, nearly 60 km (37 mi) away.

I used my Canon EOS 6 Mk II camera to capture the three images that make up the final panorama, coupled with a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 25 seconds @ ISO 3200.

The most massive of the planets in our solar system, Jupiter, is one of the “gas giant” planets. As far as we know, Jupiter is almost wholly comprised of gases, and all that gas makes it an excellent reflector of the Sun’s light. After the Moon and Venus, Jupiter is the brightest object regularly visible in Earth’s night sky.

Jupiter had not long risen when I captured today’s photo of it ascending the sky off Gerroa, Australia, with its gorgeous glow reflected by the headland’s tidal rock pools. I lit the foreground with my LumeCube LED lamps, giving the rocks and gravelly beach a yellowed look, adding to the other-worldly feel of the entire scene.

I captured this single-frame image using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

The 5%-illuminated Moon was slowly gliding down to the western horizon tonight, seemingly balancing on the boom of a construction crane a few hundred metres from my home. The Moon wasn’t as close as the crane, obviously, moving through space in its orbit around the Earth, nearly 399,000 km (248,000 mi) away. Lights from the intersection near the construction site provided plenty of glow to make the crane’s formwork visible.

While I enjoy the long car trips I take to get to dark skies for my Milky Way images, it was nice only to have to walk from my desk to our balcony to photograph this scene.

I shot this single-frame photo with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera attached to a Sigma 50-500mm f/5.6 lens @ 500 mm @ f/7.1, using an exposure time of 0.6 seconds @ ISO 1600.