Here's I3/ATLAS from the 0.8m at Mt Kent as of 1 hr ago. The clip is a 50-min sequence.

The tail of comet G3 is extraordinary! It was already visually stunning to me in dark skies, but in photographs there is so much detail in its striations and bands - the poor comet has been stripped apart. Taken over farmland in southern Queensland as thunderstorms rolled by.
50mm f2.2 36x10s 800D

Some team members may include

Comet G3 is getting exciting! Here it is from my back porch overlooking Toowoomba just an hour after sunset.

110mm 26x4s

I love comets - there are very few things visible to the naked eye that come and go in the night sky. Comet G3 low in the horizon soon after sunset, only 11deg from the sun. Hoping it will remain bright for a week or more.

Comet Tsuchinshan Atlas has been quite a show over the last month. Some final shots before it fades away from us. One of the best comets I’ve see for a long time.

We were joined by a special guest while setting up for comet photos. Joys of Queensland

From 27deg S, our part of Queensland is not well know for its Aurora displays

The tail of Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas stretching dozen degrees, amazing in dark skies :)

With @astroshishir.bsky.social

The long tail of Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas stretched over Toowoomba

70mm

Rising above the clouds in a Timelapse

Tsuchinshan-ATLAS growing a nice tail now. Still difficult to see without binoculars, so low to the horizon before sunrise.

Getting up at 4am to see Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS rising over the Toowoomba range

Sydney also provided independent age estimates of the association with rotation and lithium measurements.

Looking forward to expanding the young planet population over the next few years as we look deeper into these new young associations!

The planets around TIC434398831 were identified by Sydney's independent planet search around pre-main sequence stars from TESS. With follow-up thanks to CHEOPS and many ground-based collaborators.

What: We compared our results against expectations from planet evolution models. We found planets at this age are much larger, and occupy different periods, than that from the Kepler distribution! This is what gas-rich planet formation models predict!

Why: Multiple formation channels may have led to the current Kepler planet distribution. For example, small planets may have formed gas rich, or water rich. It’s difficult to tell them apart by looking at mature planets. Yet they differ significantly in their youth.

Highlighting new paper by UniSQ PhD student Sydney Vach! She computed the occurrence rate of planets <200 Myr with TESS. arxiv.org/abs/2403.03261

Hello from Toowoomba, Queensland! When I’m not pretending to put AO on our local telescopes with laser pointers for photoops, I’m enjoying the company of two fur babies and one skin baby.