If you haven’t ticked Mercury off your planet bucket list yet, tonight is the night! Use bright red-coloured Mars as your guide and you’ll spot the closest planet to the Sun in no time at all. After sunset on 13th November, Mercury is just to the left of...
A waning crescent moon creates ideal dark sky conditions for this year’s Leonids Meteor Shower. You can make the most of watching for “shooting stars”. The Leonids Meteor Shower is generated from comet Tempel-Tuttle. The shower, which radiates from...
Eclipses are wonderful examples of the extraordinary motion of the objects within our Solar System. For natural cosmic phenomena, you don’t get more remarkable than a total eclipse of the Moon! For a total lunar eclipse to occur, the Sun, Earth and Moon need to...
For the early birds on the 18th March, there’s a beautiful view of the Moon and Mars appearing very close to one another with the Moon just nearby. Mars is the red star-like object above the Moon. Bright Mercury is a little higher up. Use the above image as a...
April is a great time to start viewing the famous Australian constellation of the Southern Cross. You can track it over mid-autumn and winter evenings. When you head outside to stargaze, what you will notice first are two bright stars on a diagonal. The brighter of...
The Quadrantids Meteor Shower is better seen from northern Western Australia. The radiant point, or the point in the sky where the meteors seem to come from, is below the horizon for southern WA which reduces the number of visible shooting stars. It is a popular...
This is the month to view Jupiter! The image above is for about 8pm on 10th January. On this date, Jupiter is at what is called “opposition” and means its closest to Earth for the year. It also means that this is the ideal time to view Jupiter through...
Antares is a super giant red star and the 15th brightest star we see in the the Southern Hemisphere’s night sky. In the early hours of 15th January, the Moon will pass in front of Antares and the view should be spectacular, especially when the action starts....
The Alpha Centaurids Meteor Shower gets its name from the apparent origin of the meteors, in this case, the constellation of Centaurus, which rises in the south eastern sky at this time of year. This means that the meteors will appear to come from a south easterly...
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