Satellites of Jupiter

Europa, Io, Ganymede & Callisto

2022-07-27 NGC 6520 OC in Sagittarius Stack_21frames_1835s

Towards the Galaxy’s Heart

The Ink Spot and open cluster NGC 6520

Saturn

It’s Saturn season again!

2021 Review: Post 1 of 3

Moon & Planets A reprise of my best Solar System images taken during the year. What! No Comet Leonard? Well … More

Celestial Alignment

A twilight view of Mercury, Spica & Venus with the asteroid Vesta in attendance.

A Shadow on Jupiter

Io Casts a Shadow

Moon and ExoMoons.

Exciting discovery!

Total Lunar Eclipse (2)

26th May 2021

Total Lunar Eclipse

26th May 2021

Uranus

The Seventh Planet

Mars

Mars at opposition.

Saturn

With its largest Moon, Titan

Jupiter

Jupiter with moons Ganymede and Io.

Moon

Two Days Before Full Moon.

How Asteroids And Supernovae Are Named

The Universe And All That.
How Asteroids and Supernovae Are Named.

Exomoons and Double Planets

The Universe And All That.
Exomoons and Double Planets

Planet Or Star?

The Universe And All That.
Is the Moon a Planet or a Star?

Venus – Regular as Clockwork

Every nineteen months Venus moves into our evening sky, stays for about nine and a half months and then disappears below our evening horizon

Venus

Designation: Venus Visual magnitude: -3.8 (varies between -3.4 to -4.2 over its cycle) Apparent size: 18 arc seconds. current. … More

Saturn Occultation – April 2019

This is my DSLR image taken a few minutes after Saturn reappeared following its occultation by the Moon. Here in … More

Saturn Occultation

Next week will bring a challenging photo opportunity, with Saturn due to be occulted by the Moon. Here in Macarthur … More

Mars

This image of Mars was composed from a 4.8 minute video exposure, using the digital crop feature of my DSLR … More

Saturn Near Full Tilt

Saturn’s rings are at their widest tilt for the year this month (September 2018), at 26.3°, just short of last year’s … More

Venus Back in the Evening Twilight

Our neighbouring planet Venus recently returned to the evening sky and will dominate the Western sky after sunset until Ocober. … More

Saturn

Saturn: Visual magnitude: +0.4 Apparent diameter: 17.3 arc-sec Actual diameter: 120,536 km Distance: 9.6 AU Image: Exposure: 5,900 video frames … More

Jupiter

2017-04-23: Jupiter and its third largest moon, Io. Taken at The Oaks, NSW. Image stacked from around 9150 video frames, … More

Two Planets

No, that really isn’t the Moon. It’s a planet – Venus. It’s summer here in Sydney and the late sunsets … More

Neptune Conjunction

I love planetary conjunctions and watching the Solar System in action as the planets follow their orbits across the sky. … More

Venus Meets The Moon

The planetary conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and Mercury is just about over but tonight the two day old crescent Moon … More

Near The Horizon

Last night I joined my Macarthur Astronomical Society friends at Campbelltown Rotary Observatory for another of our public astronomy nights. … More

Comet C/2013 X1 (Panstarrs)

C/2013 X1 passed Earth at abour 0.6AU distance this month and was reportedly brighter than mag. 7.0, so I decided … More

Three Planets

Jupiter, Saturn and Mars are riding high in the Northern sky at the moment. All images © R.Powell

Jupiter

2016-03-05 Jupiter (above) processed from video via Registax All images © R.Powell

Saturn Revisited

Having begun to understand how to process planetary images using video clip frames stacked in Registax, I went back into … More

Mars

Mars is at its closest point to Earth this month and I took the opportunity to learn the technique of … More

Jupiter and Mars

I was hoping to see comets during this observing session but while the sky looked clear, we had high haze, making narrow … More

Lunar Eclipse

The Lunar eclipse of 23rd March 2016. I had no high expectations of this event. It was a penumbral eclipse, … More

2012 – Planets

Click on an image for slide show of my planetary images taken in 2012: All images © R.Powell

2011 – Solar System

2010 – Solar System

2010 – Moon

I took a lot of Moon shots in 2010. Here are is a sample…. …and here are a few more: … More

2009 – Solar System

These were my first tentative steps into the Solar System with my astrophotography. I was using a Canon 300D back … More

2009 – Moon

My first post on this website was in June 2014 but I began my astro-photography journey well before then. So … More

Moon, Ring Nebula, Albireo, Jewel Box, Venus, Jupiter

New Horizons: Pluto-Charon – 2

More wonderful images of the Pluto-Charon System, just in: (Above) Pluto nearly fills the frame in this image from the … More

New Horizons: Pluto-Charon – 1

For the next few days I am going to break my own rule and post NASA images instead of my … More

Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter – 1

2015-06-27 Venus Jupiter Sunset – Wide Angle Jupiter and Venus are edging towards a very close conjunction on 1st July. … More

Conjunction of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter

2015-06-20 Moon Venus Jupiter 18mm. (c) R.Powell On 20th June 2015 the crescent Moon passed close to Venus … More

Comet C2015 G2 (Master)

A visitor to the Solar System – Comet C2015 G2 (Master). It was at about sixth magnitude in the constellation of … More

Jupiter

Above: Jupiter: Meade LX-90, Canon 60D, 4xBarlow Jupiter is high in the evening sky at the moment and I took … More

47 Tucanae and Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy)

I was out at our dark sky site with good friends from Macarthur Astronomical Society, testing my LX-90 in polar … More

Ptolemy’s Cluster

I haven’t done a lot of astro-photography lately for several reasons. One of them being my attempts to convert the … More

Lunar Crescents

Occultation Of Saturn

We experienced another occultation of Saturn by the Moon on 4th August 2014. This image was obtained by my Canon 60D … More

Comet C2012 F6 (Lemmon)

Partial Solar Eclipse

These images are from the partial solar eclipse seen here in NSW on 29th April 2014. As is so often … More