Australian Sky & Telescope

FOR A LONG TIME, undertaking astrophotography from light-polluted city and suburban skies had been difficult. But fortunately today there are lots of tricks and techniques you can use to successfully take impressive deep sky shots from your backyard,

ASTRONOMERS HAVE OBTAINED a precise new mass measurement for Beta Pictoris b, a gas-giant planet 63 light-years from Earth. Ignas Snellen and Anthony Brown (both at Leiden University, The Netherlands) reported the measurement on August 20 in Nature A

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spacecraft flew to within 24 million kilometres of the Sun’s photosphere during its fly-by on November 6, Australian time. The event marked the mission’s first-of-several perihelion passages, as the spacecraft begins its orb

NEW ANALYSIS OF THE MASSIVE Eta Carinae star system supports the idea that the system once had three stars — but only two survived. Eta Carinae experienced its so-called Great Eruption about 170 years ago: a blast that resembled a supernova in feroci

The SEIS seismometer’s sensors reside inside a vacuum chamber with a self-levelling, three-legged platform. Those sensors must operate in vacuum in order to be sensitive enough to detect ground motions as small as 2.5 × 10 m — about half the Bohr rad

WHEN Early December 1 a.m. Late December Midnight Early January 11 p.m. Late January 10 p.m. These are daylight saving times. Subtract one hour if daylight saving is not applicable. HOW: Go outside within an hour or so of a time listed above. Hol

The new year has begun, and with it another 12 months of celestial delights await us. See our 2019 guide to the sky on pages 40–41 for a full rundown of all the phenomena you can expect to see. But for this, the first month of the year, we have two o

Below I have chosen the ‘pick of the crop’ as far as meteor showers go for southern observers in 2019. When reading these predictions, remember that meteor rates are usually given in terms of the zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) — the theoretical maximum n

In our November 2018 issue we featured two S Doradus-type variables in the Small Magellanic Cloud: HD 5980 and SMC V2018. If you have the article handy, give it a quick re-read, for this month we introduce S Doradus itself in the Large Magellanic Clo

JUPITER RISES in the early morning hours during January and will put on a show with Venus in the latter part of the month (see page 46). Here are the times, in Universal Time, when the Great Red Spot should cross Jupiter’s central meridian. The date

Although its name means cold, we only see Mare Frigoris when illuminated by sunlight and therefore when it is quite hot. In fact, we see Frigoris so often because it stretches about 1,600 km between the crater Atlas near the Moon’s northeastern limb

In 2005 Warren Brown (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory) found the first “hypervelocity” star — that is, the first gravitationally unbound star ever seen: a luminous blue star that the big black hole at the galaxy’s centre had shot into the halo.

Celestron ♦ celestron.com Building on the success of its 27.5-cm (11-inch) Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph (RASA for short), Celestron has introduced 20-cm f/2 and 35.5-cm f/2.2 RASAs for 2019. These specialised instruments are strictly for imaging

If the images on pages 12–17 of this issue (being the winning and runner-up photos from the 2018 Auckland Astronomical Society Harry Williams Astrophotography Competition) have inspired you to test your skill, there are a number of local and internat