I made this display of the data from our meteor camera over the last month. star-safari.nz/wp-content/u...

Percy was out for a run at St Thomas school over the last few days. In this shot; looking for signs of life in the carpet. Also learned what to do when Percy decides to change its IP address without telling anyone.

Sun Dog yesterday.

Fantastic presentation on Timescape by @ryanridden.bsky.social yesterday at the South Island Stardate. Exciting times in cosmology! He also gave an awesome presentation on Cosmic Cataclysms and how we can get involved in it through zooniverse. Wow! Some great research going on at UC!

Here’s a very bad image of Venus, just before setting taken through our 8” refractor. Snapped with a carefully held phone.

Here’s Percy in action.

Our Perseverance has been exploring Mars at St Thomas School today.

The Moon last night.

Our model of Perseverance is slowly making its way through a huge upgrade. We’ve got our first school visit for the year coming up in about ten days so not much time get it finished and tested. New OS, new robotic arm, new microscope, repaired wheels and strengthened suspension + more stuff.

Here’s the Moon passing through the eyepiece of our telescope. Including my two favourite craters; Clavius and Tycho.

Pretty cool sunset the other day at the observatory, the clouds went away about 20 mins after this picture.

Here’s C/2024 G3 ATLAS from last night at Star Safari Observatory.

Here’s the Moon last tonight. This is taken through our 16” reflector with my phone.

We had a bit of an Aurora last night, I got the GoPro set up just in time.

Got the big refractor out to look at Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars last night. Despite the high cloud the gaps moved around and we could end up Seeing the whole sky. A fantastic evening of star and planet gazing.

Here’s some star trails from a couple of nights ago and the ISS making a guest appearance. Merry Christmas everyone!

We hosted a school at our observatory a couple of nights ago. An awesome night of sharing the night sky with the next generation.

At Wellesley College today. Second camera installed and a small upgrade to the software complete. All ready for some young Mars explorers to practice their skills.

Space ring. This is only one object (a quasar) whose light was distorted from our perspective due to gravitational lensing effect, caused by a foreground massive galaxy. 🔭 🧪

I made this star trail movie tonight, taken at our observatory.

Here’s a shot of Venus, awesome sunset tonight, mainly because of the all the haze.

Our Perseverance rover is in for servicing and getting some new parts. Mainly replacing the PLA with ABS on some of the more loaded parts. Two more schools to visit this year, then the rover will be getting a major software upgrade to ROS2 and the arm is going to be added.

Rare photo of the Milky Way seen from the surface of Mars

Here’s our model of Perseverance that we take around schools. The students get to operate it.

Busy few days, Horahora School near Cambridge and then up to the Bay of Islands to Kerikeri High School. So cool when a student says they want to study astrobiology after one of our sessions.

Jonathan's Space Report No. 839 published at planet4589.org/jsr.html

Up to Auckland, today we’re at Campbells Bay School. This school has one of the best views from a staff room we’ve seen, stunning views of the Hauraki Gulf/Tīkapa Moana.

Here’s our planetarium all set up and ready for the arrival of students. We were at an awesome location, the Air Force Museum in Christchurch.

Our model Perseverance undergoing urgent repairs with super glue (unavailable on Mars). It’s done well so far with just over 4000 students operating without incident.

Our first post on BlueSky is the amazing Aurora we had a couple of weeks ago at our observatory in Wairarapa. #astronomy #aurora #space