The band of the Milky Way stretches nicely across this pre-dawn fisheye view. The noticeable round dot in the Milky Way is the bright planet Jupiter. The light pillar extending from the horizon toward the Milky Way is the zodiacal light. And what appears to be a smudge on the bottom right hand of the image, is in fact the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), an irregular dwarf galaxy that can be seen with the naked eye under dark skies in the Southern Hemisphere.

Another morning meant another opportunity to catch the lovely show of the planets. As the moon was quite literally out of the picture, the rather faint glow of the zodiacal light was visible. The zodiacal light is a pillar of light that is visible in the east just before sunrise during fall in the Southern Hemisphere. A few minutes later dawn set in, and Mercury became visible above the mountains.

These days the early bird not only catches the worm, but a lovely show of the planets, as they parade along the ecliptic (the apparent path that the sun, moon and planets follow in the Earth’s sky). The next two days the waning crescent moon will cuddle up with Venus and Mercury respectively before doing its disappearing act on new moon. Please be aware that this image was taken in the Southern Hemisphere, where the ecliptic is much steeper at this time of year, which means that the planets Venus and Mercury are higher in the sky and can therefore be more easily spotted.

This beautiful nightscape above the derelict church of Serón features many of the well-known objects of the southern sky:  the bright stars Alpha and Beta Centauri, the Southern Cross, the Coalsack Nebula, the Magellanic Clouds as well as the globular clusters Omega Centauri and 47 TUC.

Currently Mars is shining brightly in one of the most intriguing parts of the Milky Way. The picture shows Mars (the orange dot in the left hand corner) along with the Lagoon Nebula ( red cloud below Mars), the Trifid Nebula (small red-blue dot to the right of the Lagoon Nebula), the Omega Nebula (red dot to the far right) and the Eagle Nebula (in the lower right corner).  Also visible are a number of star clusters, the most prominent of which is the globular cluster M22 (the bright white dot at the upper edge of the image).

Tonight I caught the waxing moon, 6 days after  new moon, with 14% of the disk illuminated. This shot was taken through a telescope with at a focal length of 1600 mm.

I was taking images of the zodiacal light or false dusk (a triangle of light that is visible in the West just after sunset during springtime in the Southern Hemisphere), when a bright meteor illuminated the scene, only missing Saturn by a hair.  

Scorpius and the planets Mars (brightest dot in the upper left hand corner) and Saturn (bright white dot almost straight below Mars) one day after full moon. The image was taken with a special diffuser filter to highlight the colors of the stars and planets.

Finally El Niño gave us a break and we had a spectacular clear night, which I used for some wide-field images of the Milky Way. The bright red dot above the Milky Way is the planet Mars, the fainter red dot below it is Antares (the main star of the constellation Scorpius), and the brighter dot to the left of Antares is the planet Saturn. The images were taken with my camera sitting “piggyback” on a  telescope with motorized tracking.