About this site

astronomy.net.nz has carried New Zealand sky pages since 2003: aurora reports, comet photos, moon halos and notes from public astronomy days. The domain lapsed for a while and has now been relaunched as Southern Sky Notes, an independent, non-commercial notebook about watching the sky from Aotearoa.

What you will find here:

• Aurora australis: how to read the space weather data, where to stand and how to photograph it.
• Dark skies: New Zealand's dark sky reserves, sanctuaries and parks, and how ordinary outdoor lighting affects them.
• Equipment: first telescopes, binoculars, mounts and cameras, chosen for southern latitudes.
• Backyard observing: building and maintaining a small observatory or viewing deck in a damp, windy, UV-heavy climate.

The older pages in the sky archive keep their original web addresses, because other sites still link to them, but the text is new. None of the original photographs are reproduced.

Nothing here is sponsored. Links go to the organisations that know the subject best: the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand, NASA, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's space weather service and MetService.