My photo today brings you three of these Messier objects, M31, M33 and M110. Apart from their dry catalogue names, two of these galaxies have the common names of the “Andromeda Galaxy” (M31) and the “Triangulum Galaxy” (M33). Their distances from Earth are 2.5 million (M31 & M110) and 2.73 million (M33) light-years.

I captured this photo without the use of a telescope or telephoto lens. I shot nine pictures of the foreground and sky, plus twelve “dark” frames, which were combined in software to reduce the amount of digital noise present. For all of the twenty-one images, I used the same equipment and settings. These were my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 12800.

There are two very-distant galaxies visible in this photo. They are the Andromeda Galaxy (aka M31) and the Triangulum Galaxy (M33). At distances of 2.5 million light-years (M31) and 3.0 million light-years (M33) from us here on Earth, these two galaxies are the most distant objects that are visible with the naked eye.

Neither of the two looks like anything more than smudges on my photo, but they are big. They’re huge, in fact. M31 is a spiral galaxy that is the nearest major galaxy to our Milky Way. Recent estimates put the total number of resident stars at about 1 trillion, which is around twice the number of stars in the Milky Way. With an estimated 40 billion stars, M33 is the smallest spiral galaxy in what is known as the “Local Group”, after Andromeda and the Milky Way.

The location for this photo was Taralga, a rural village of around 460 people, situated in the Southern Tablelands region of my state of New South Wales, Australia.

I shot two overlapping photographs to create this image. Once on my Mac, the photos were given some adjustments to bring up their brightness and reduce digital noise, then stitched together in the program Autopano Pro. I then made a few more edits in Lightroom and Photoshop.

For each of the two original images, I used a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/4.0, with an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 12800.

On my last nightscape photography trip to Taralga, Australia, I was able to get some shots of the Milky Way’s core region not long before it set over the southwestern horizon. Once that favoured area of the heavens was–literally–out of the picture, I turned my attention to photographing some of the other galaxies that are visible here in the Southern Hemisphere.

I recently posted one of those images, containing the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are dwarf galaxies travelling through space with our own Milky Way galaxy. As well as those relatively-close massive collections of stars, planets, dust, gas and asteroids–and the odd black hole or two–there are a few other “islands universes” that are visible to naked-eye observers. I photographed two of these, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy, as they hung low in the northern sky.

Known in astronomical catalogues as “M31”, the Andromeda Galaxy sits around 2.5 million light-years from our position in the “Local Group” of galaxies. M31 is visible in my photo as a fuzzy-yet-distinct bright disc mid-way down the shot, and about one third in from the left. If you look up to the right, in the one o’clock direction from Andromeda, there’s a much smaller blur of light showing the position of the Triangulum Galaxy. Aka “M33”, this galaxy is nearly 3 million light-years away in space. The Milky Way, M31 and M33 are the three largest galaxies, respectively, in the Local Group.

This image was stacked from ten single-frame photos, each of which I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 8 seconds @ ISO 6400.

After nearly five weeks straight of clouds covering the skies at any location that I planned to shoot from, last Saturday night gave me a gem of a view of the heavens. The only clouds that I could see were the two dwarf galaxies captured in my photo, the Large (left) and Small (on the right) Magellanic Clouds. These concentrations of stars, nebulae, gas and dust are travelling through space with our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Looking like puffs of light in the heavens, the Magellanic Clouds are adored by astronomers, astrophotographers and casual stargazers throughout the Southern Hemisphere.

The Southern Tablelands region of my state, New South Wales, had been a much-visited spot on the map for me during 2018 & 2019, but Saturday night was the first time I’d made it there in 2020. I did the 540 km (335 mi) round-trip in one night, stopping here at the Taralga Wind Farm for photos of the low-hanging Milky Way, and a few other features of our southern summer skies.

The two brightest stars in the constellation of Centaurus are flanking the base of the turbine’s pylon–and its accompanying tree–close to the bottom of their circuit of the South Celestial Pole. An abundance of atmospheric airglow coloured the background sky, and you can see the crimson hues of the Eta Carina nebula dominating the lower left-hand corner of my shot.

I lit the foreground of the scene with an LED bank as I shot the photo with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, with an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.

While choosing a photo to post today, I spent possibly too much time deciding if I should select this one. I had a feeling that I’d featured these fluffy, floating orbs–the Magellanic Clouds–too many times throughout 2020, and didn’t want to bore anyone. After a quick flick through my published images for the year, I found that this will be only the third time since January that I’ve brought them to you, and I hope that you’ll enjoy another look.

Despite their names, you’re not looking at clouds but two dwarf galaxies that are travelling through space with our Milky Way galaxy, at the relatively close distances of 163,000 light-years and 206,000 light-years from us, respectively. My photo managed to capture them both in the same frame, but that gap between the two irregular dwarf galaxies has been measured at around 75,000 light-years. Southern Hemisphere observers–and some from the lower northern latitudes–can see the Clouds in the night sky, even in light-polluted cities such as the one I live in, Sydney, Australia.

To create this photo, I shot eleven individual images of this part of the sky, then combined (stacked) those in software so that I could reduce the amount of digital signal noise in the scene. For each one of the eleven frames, I used a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.0 using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Sometime around the year 964 AD, a Persian astronomer named Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi made the earliest recorded sighting of what we now call the Andromeda Galaxy, describing it as a “nebulous smear” [Source: Wikipedia]. Since then, this smudge on the night sky has been thought by observers to be a variety of astronomical objects. Astronomers have estimated it to be at a wide range of distances from the Earth. As recently as 2019 the mass of the “Andromeda Nebula” when compared to our home galaxy, the Milky Way, was revised in line with new data from measurements of both galaxies.

Aside from the physical characteristics of the object, the ancient observer’s smear is renowned for its visual beauty. My little photo here doesn’t do justice to the details, colours or shape of the giant spiral that is moving through space, at a distance from Earth of 2.5 million light-years or so. Still, I do love to photograph M31 (as it’s commonly known) when I can and hope to see it someday from our Northern Hemisphere. The view of M31 there is much better than the atmospherically-blurred look that I get in my part of Australia.

This photo of M31 was taken west of Nowra, Australia, and is what is known as a “stacked” image. I shot twelve consecutive “light” frames of the scene, then took another 12 with my camera’s lens cap in place (known as “dark” frames). Next, I processed the light frames in Adobe’s Lightroom Classic Software, then made use of an app called Starry Landscape Stacker to remove a lot of the digital noise present in the original shots. I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 4.0 seconds @ ISO 6400, to capture the original images.

Not for the first time, the appearance of the two dwarf galaxies known as the “Magellanic Clouds” remind me of jellyfish, or similarly amorphous inhabitants of the ocean. Seeing them hovering over the Tasman Sea at Gerroa, Australia here in my photo makes that act of imagination a whole lot easier. The “Clouds” aren’t creatures, nor are they from the ocean, but are companions of our Milky Way galaxy, travelling with us through the Local Group of galaxies, yet visible to nocturnal folk here in the Southern Hemisphere.

To the upper-left of the Small Magellanic Cloud is what looks like an overgrown star, but is a globular star cluster–a big ball of stars, pretty much–with the unromantic name of 47 Tucanae. This bright and slightly fuzzy orb that I included in the photo is about 120 light-years in diameter, making it a massive ball of stars, indeed.

To produce this final photo, I shot two overlapping images & after editing those in Adobe Lightroom Classic, I stitched them together with the (now-defunct) application Autopano Pro. After stitching, I washed the composite frame through Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop (for noise reduction and improving some of the details). The two original frames that I took were shot with my Canon EOS 6D camera, fitted with a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 3200.

Northern hemisphere folk have been enjoying a celestial show over the past week or more, in the form of a naked-eye-visible comet. The celestial sojourner has a name that is, per astronomical good-practice, totally unromantic and very clinical. "Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE" — or just NEOWISE for short, is what's written on its name tag. The name came from the NASA mission that discovered it, also called NEOWISE, for Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. You can hit up Google–or your favourite search engine–to find thousands of photos of this beautiful addition to the northern summer's skies.

OK, that Public Service Announcement out of the way, I can now go on to tell you about my less-exciting-than-a-comet photo. The image features the Milky Way's neighbouring galaxy M31, aka the "Andromeda Galaxy". I need to explain that the word "neighbouring" has a different scale about it in the realm of astronomy. M31 is around 2.5 million light-years from our home planet and is one of the most distant objects that mere mortals can see with our unaided eyes. That's not the kind of neighbour to whom you can pay a quick visit to borrow some tools or a cup of sugar, but in the scale of things in the universe, it's nearby.

My photo was created by taking two shots of the same scene, which I then processed through what is known as "stacking" software to reduce the digital noise in the image and try to enhance the details of the distant galaxy.

I took the two images using my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 3200. The software used to make the final stacked image is called "Starry Landscape Stacker".

In early May of 2019, I trekked from my home in Sydney, Australia, to the rural region of Goulburn, in the Southern Tablelands region of New South Wales. The Eta Aquariids meteor shower was due to be at its peak on this date, so I was hopeful of photographing at least a few of the flashing, flying fragments as they burnt up in our Earth’s atmosphere. After around six hours of shooting single images, time-lapses and panoramas, I ended photographing only three short and dim Eta Aquariid meteors trails.

Ironically, the meteor that showed up in today’s shot (on the lower left) wasn’t from that night’s shower but was one of the random flashes that happen multiple times daily around the world. There was an intense amount of green atmospheric airglow present in the atmosphere that night, easily visible in the photo. The two Magellanic Clouds–satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way–dominate right-hand half of the image.

This photo is a single-frame shot that I captured with my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.

I shot this photo last Thursday night, 27th February. The only clouds visible were the two galaxies you see in the picture, known as the Magellanic Clouds. Astronomers classify these two blobs of light as dwarf galaxies, and they travel through space with our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

The Magellanic Clouds are a familiar sight to Southern Hemisphere folk who’ve spent even a little bit of time studying the night sky. The galaxies are easily mistaken for the meteorological objects after which they’re named. If you look carefully, you can see the smaller cloud–aka the Small Magellanic Cloud–reflected in the water that the tide had washed over the rock shelf at Black Point Head, Gerroa, Australia.

With clouds and rain forecast for at least the next two weeks, I have to keep looking at photos like this to remind me that clear skies can come again.

The photo is a single-frame image, captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm f/2.4 lens @ f/3.2, using an exposure time of 20 seconds @ ISO 6400.

In 1771 the French astronomer Charles Messier published a catalogue listing 110 nebulae and star clusters. He did this to help comet hunters discern between fuzzy blobs in the sky that were new comets, or already-discovered deep sky objects. Messier listed each object with the letter “M” (for Messier, of course) and a catalogue number. Unknown to Messier at the time was the fact that some of these “nebulae” were discreet galaxies like our Milky Way, located millions of light-years from us on Earth. My photo brings you three of these Messier objects, M31, M33 and M110. Apart from their dry catalogue names, two of these galaxies have the common names of the “Andromeda Galaxy” (M31) and the “Triangulum Galaxy” (M33).

I captured this photo without the use of a telescope or telephoto lens. I shot nine pictures of the foreground and sky, plus twelve “dark” frames, which were combined in software to reduce the amount of digital noise present. For all of the twenty-one images, I used the same equipment and settings. These were my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.0, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 12800.

Only a minute or two before I took this photo, the moon had started to make its appearance for the night. Although not yet clear of the horizon, the Earth’s silvery companion-in-space was already beginning to brighten the sky with its light.

The Milky Way’s core was very low on the southwestern horizon when I shot this scene. I had quite a few shots of that part of the sky already “in the can”, so opted to snap off a few frames with the Magellanic Clouds featured over this old stone church. The stones are old, for sure, with locals having completed the building in 1859. I but I think I’m right in guessing, though, that the plastic water tank and corrugated metal roof might not be of the same vintage as the bulk of the structure.

This photo is a single-frame image that I captured using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.

The Danjera Dam near Nowra, Australia, is a popular campsite and especially so for freshwater fishing folk. Its seven-kilometre long catchment is stocked with rainbow trout and Australian bass and hosts plenty of eels. Also under the waters of the dam are the ruins of the old mining town of Yalwal, where gold was discovered in 1852. A bushfire in 1939 burnt almost the whole village, leaving only one residence, one shop and the Post Office. Completion of the dam in 1971 drowned the gully and with it the area’s gold-boom history.

I have visited the dam a half-dozen or so times in the past two years, including on an ill-fated trip in early November, when I lost the memory card containing my last Milky Way core shots of the year. There were also several photos of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, on that memory card, so I had to go back one more time to shoot some more. This time I was very careful to make sure that the memory card made it home with me. As well as M31 there are plenty of stars visible in the sky, and a few reflected off the dam's surface, towards the bottom of the shot.

Here is a photo of M31 in the sky over the dam, which I captured with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.4, using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.

Despite the drought that’s afflicted most of my home state of New South Wales, there is a lot of green in this photo. The poplar trees that had been bare during winter and earlier in our southern spring were well dressed in their foliage, and the paddocks behind them seemed to have had enough water to keep them looking just as green. On this night the sky was showing a lovely shade of green, too. That colour in the background sky comes from the atmospheric effect known as “airglow”, a feature of the night that our unaided eyes cannot see.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds–companion galaxies that are travelling through space with our Milky Way–are the two distinct, fuzzy objects that are hanging in the heavens between the two poplars. Although they’re visible all year round, the summer months down here below the equator provide some of the best opportunities to see and photograph the two stellar sidekicks.

Photographed near the rural city of Nowra, Australia, in late October of 2019, I shot this single-frame image using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, with an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.