Stellar Australis Blog

The Coiling Dragon

Messier 78 writhes in Orion’s nebula, coiling restlessly like an asian dragon within a heaven of smoke and glimpses of fire. Its getting a bit late in the season for M78, I had to...

The Burning Flower

With a bit of imagination, this image of the center of the Carina nebula appears like a flower surrounded in a turbulent sea of flame. Even brighter than the Orion Nebula, the Carina nebula...

Something Stalks Distant Rigel

The Witch Head Nebula appears as a ghostly appartition silently drifting past the blue supergiant star Rigel, bathing in its cold coloured hues in contrast to the faint redish browns of the surrounding gas...

Orion and his Horse

A small mosaic (two panels) showing some horse looking thing and another bright blue nebula that no one can recognise…/humour I was planning to do a large mosaic of the entire Orion constellation region...

Stella Tempest

Usually images of this region of the Orion contellation focus mostly on the Horsehead and Flame Nebula as these are bright (relatively) and recognisable. However, these nebulae are but one part of a complex...

Mist of Pleiades (redux)

Re-learning some old processing skills that have faded over the past year of relative inaction, I’ve re-processed my previous wide-field image to include some shorter length exposures to produce an HDR version. HDR has...

Magellan Tempest

There has been recent furore regarding the naming of the Magellanic Clouds (despite his early writings on the galaxies, Magellan was not the earliest recorder of the galaxies). A movement has been growing to...

Mists of Pleiades

The bright stars of Pleiades shine through the mist like dust that drifts within the intersellar emptiness, their pale blue light revealing the seemingly gentle currents driven by the light of the stars themselves....

GWN7 News

I was fortunate that my Astrofest win and Eclipse photo was the subject of a short TV news feature presented on GWN 7 news on the 22nd of November 2023. Exciting!!! My few seconds...