I write this while on a ship in the South Atlantic travelling from the Falkland Islands to South Georgia on a wildlife expedition to see the amazing creatures and plant life in the polar regions and Antarctica before the environment is altered through climate change. Image Credit: Glynn Bennallick To get here, on the way down south to Buenos Aires, I glanced out of my plane window at night over the wing to the…

Pickering’s Triangle, also known as Pickering’s Triangular Wisp, is a fascinating part of the Cygnus Loop, the remains of a supernova explosion that occurred 10 –15 thousand years ago. It was discovered photographically in 1904 by Williamina Fleming at the Harvard Observatory, although the credit went to the observatory’s director, Edward Charles Pickering – a process that happened all too often then. The Triangle is a complex network of shimmering filaments and expanding gas…

G’day! I write this from far, far away in the hot centre of Australia at the sacred Aboriginal site of Uluru. Low humidity and lack of light, make Uluru one of the best stargazing spots in the world. The night sky south of the equator is a different view of the universe than we have in Cornwall. For instance, the constellation Orion that we see in our wintertime can also be seen down under…

The press are calling C/2023 A3, ‘Comet of the century’ A slight exaggeration perhaps, but it is certainly the best we have seen since C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) back in 2020. This is the view you get if you look towards the West for the next couple of weeks. The markings show date ( sorry, only available in American Month, then Day format) and the best optimum viewing time. C/2023 A3 is now at a…

The fear of the number 13, known as triskaidekaphobia, ties into the asteroid Apophis’s close Earth approach on Friday, April 13, 2029. Despite no collision risk, Apophis’s proximity provides an unprecedented chance for scientific study, offering insights into planetary defense and the solar system’s early composition, observed by global space agencies….

Sh2-129 Squid Nebula (HOO with RGB stars) from multiple nights in 2022. 29hrs of data gathered. Some of it very difficult to process as the ZWO 7 Nm OIII filter allowed the brightest stars to bloat horribly. The blue nebulosity behind those bright stars has been lost in the processing. I am making a case, to myself, for the purchase of an Astrodon 3Nm OIII filter because I have other targets whose data could…