News

The Omega Centauri globular star cluster (NGC5139), a mouthful to say, but a real highlight of the southern sky this time of year.

Pegging out commences over the weekend on the new facilities!!! That marks out their exact positions on the ground ready for site work. I will post some pics! ... See more

Plans for the new museum have been drawn up! (Thank you Bathurst Sheds). We are still a bit over budget with no grants forthcoming. I am hopeful there is a sponsor out there to be found, particularly for this building. We had planned to do some more clearing and prep work on the telescope sites today, but as you can see it is pretty cold and snowy out there. ... See more

Though I don't have my main imaging telescope operational again as yet, I used my trusty 35 year old telescope to image the Moon on the 5th August. Though not quite as good as the main scope, I am still pretty happy with the results tonight at our new observatory site. ... See more

The image of the milky way proved popular last week. So I imaged the 'other end' of it a few nights ago.

I met with the builder today as well and we will get things well and truly under way from now. Some ground should start to get broken in about a month on the imaging telescope site and the new museum. ... See more

The rich regions of stars and dark gas lanes near the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. Imaged from our new site.

I will post a few plans of our new facility later this week, after a meeting with the builder! ... See more

The images of the Moon I posted to commemorate the Apollo 50th anniversary proved very popular. I was asked if I could post more (a part 2 as such). So here are a few more from my archive of recent lunar images.

Things are still progressing slowly with the rebuild at the new site. So still no tours at present, but as soon as they are available I'll post an announcement. ... See more

I thought I would dig through my archive of lunar images to commemorate the 50 years since Apollo 11. Hope you enjoy. Many I have imaged under high magnification, but I also like the ones showing the overall views! ... See more

I haven't posted a nebula image for a while. So I dug into the archive (while the research telescope awaits the observatory building to be rebuilt). I imaged this about 2 years ago and recently had another look at reprocessing it! This is NGC 6188.

I have had a lot of people wanting to book a tour, or even one of our learn to image the night sky classes (coming soon). It is taking much longer than expected to get construction started, as it will be cheaper (since mostly coming from our pocket with some assistance from a few wonderful contributions for you all) to do the major items at one time, rather than bit by bit.

However, as soon as re-open, we will have new images of galaxies and more, a place to bring your own equipment, our outdoor planetarium, photography and astronomy classes and much more!!!! ... See more

Last week while imaging the Milky Way, I did some with a narrower field lens. This is the region around the star Antares. Love the colour contrasts! Time as well to get a move on getting our observatory back up and running. It has been frustrating with the delays and we had hoped to have everything open by now. But we have to balance some things and really need to get the public area, research telescope and museum shed all organised at the same time. ... See more

A much wider view of the Milky Way from our new observatory site. (18mm lens). It is the region from the Southern Cross (right) to Sagittarius (left). For many Indigenous Australians, the dark areas represent an Emu. Can you see it? The richest areas of the Milky Way are best viewed from the southern hemisphere. Again the dark areas are regions of gas and dust that make up a large spiral galaxy! ... See more