When you spend all day looking at a computer screen it's a real joy to be outside in any conditions. I got my feet wet for this photo of tonight's conjunction of the Moon, Venus & Mars setting over Broken Head, Byron Bay. Unlike the hours spent collecting data on my deep space stuff, this only took 8 seconds ultimately. ISO 800 / F4 / Canon 70D. (Ok, I might have also used 15 mins of dark frame calibration exposures too). #astrophotography 

The Milky Way sets over @elementsofbyron resort in the west each night in spring. A passing cloud caught Venus' brilliant blue, currently "the evening star", the planet shines brighter than all else in the night sky. See my YouTube.com/erfmufn for a tutorial about how I used Nebulosity to stack 4 photos and then photoshop layer masking so the stacked Milky Way doesn't blur the foreground. #Byronbay #nsw #australia #astrophotography #elements #universetoday #space #venus #canonaustralia 4x 15s f3.5 ISO 1600

Milky Way season is coming to an end, so it's setting over in the west in the evening now, soon to be invisible in the daytime sky and giving way to the summer stars. I took this photo at the wedding I went to last weekend, in rural Uki NSW which offers up such spectacular dark skies that this photo is taken only with 15 second exposures, 5 of them stacked for noise reduction, then some star reduction. The dark bands of the core look like an oil painting or watercolour. I'll miss it when it's gone, as usual! #astrophotography #canonaustralia #canon70D 15s f3.5 ISO 1600 / Tokina 11-16mm 

This is what happens when you ask your astrophotographer friend to be your wedding photographer! Congratulations Emily and Chris. It was an honour to be your photon collector for the day (and night!). Venus appropriately shined brightly over your reception and the Milky Way followed it over the western horizon. Here they catch a quiet moment back at the very spot they said their vows a few hours prior. Lots of Love and best wishes from your good friends Dylan & Anna.

If you don't have a telescope, or an expensive lens, you can take photos like this with a regular DSLR camera on a "tracking" mount that allows you to take long exposures without star trails. Here I've stacked many 30s exposures with my Canon 70D and kit lens (18-135mm f5.6) at the central dark lane of the Milky Way. It shows a lot of variation in a single area, several nebulas and clusters. The bright white group is the "Small Sagittarius Star Cloud" (yes, there's a bigger one) and M25 is the cluster on the right. It would have been a nebula once and gave birth to all the stars in the cluster. You can see where it's "scooped" out the material that made the stars around it, leaving a big dark patch it now sits in. #astrophotography #canonaustralia

This is my second attempt at an iridium flare and it turned out great! Iridium communications is a company that launched a grid of satellite clusters that covers the entire planet to provide constant satellite-phone connectivity anywhere. There are about 90 of them, but about 20 of them have died including one that smashed into a Russian satellite in 2009. What you are looking at is sunlight reflecting of the door-sized antennas, glinting directly back into my camera. These flares can be predicted fairly accurately so I knew these two flares would occur within 2 minutes of each other. The bright one on the left is Iridium 37 which is still operational, but the duller on on the right is Iridium 4 which went offline about 4 years ago and has since been replaced with another (they launched enough to have some redundancy built into the grid).

I was lucky to get this because I only decided to run outside 10 minutes before it was due. The camera battery was flashing red and about to die, I had no time to focus or frame the shot. 3 minutes before it happened the ISS went though the frame as well but I didn’t add it to this shot as the exposure was wrong. I took the first shot and got the small flare, took the second shot and got the large flare – and then my camera screen flashed up “CARD FULL”! Talk about a close call. 2 x 30s / f2.8 / ISO 1600 / Canon 70D / Tokina 11mm / Nebulosity + Photoshop CC. #astrophotography 

Nice moonset over the valley this morning. Will try again tomorrow to get it closer to the horizon, but of course that happens about 30 minutes later tomorrow so may not have that nice low lying fog :) Canon 70D, 18-135mm kit lens, 1/1250s ISO 160 f5.6

I don't think I posted this single widefield view of the Carina region, including the "Emu head" Coalsack Nebula and surrounding bright band from a couple of weeks ago. It's not as dense and bright overall as the Milky Way core which is the star of the winter months but is a vivid and alluring part of the night sky regardless! No telescope or expensive specialist equipment involved. Taken with a regular Canon 70D DSLR on a tripod on the outskirts of Byron Bay. 4 x 30s / f3.2 / ISO1600 w/ Tokina 11-16mm lens. #astrophotography   #canonaustralia  

Pretty simple little landscape shot, but I had to stack the sky, trees and water separately for it to work. It turned out nice I think, but I especially like the reflection of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy on the left, and within that a bright green star. No stars in the universe are green and the green comes from the Tarantula nebula. I'm still not sure it's actually green either or if the diffuse Ha emissions come through as green from such a huge distance. Either way, it's cool that even that green distant nebula is resolvable as reflected off the water of Belongil Creek. ‪#‎astrophotography‬