@iangriffin This is my favourite of your #IansTop102022 but the comet is a close second. Thanks for all the pics you’ve posted through the year.

Number 1 in #IansTop102022 . This image took a year of my life to obtain. In September 2021 I loaded a pinhole camera with a 4 inch x 5 inch format glass plate with ISO 2 sensitivity. Every clear day, at 4pm in winter & 5pm in summer I took a 20 second exposure (manually) by opening the camera shutter. In September 2022, I stopped the exposure & developed the plate. Here's both the negative & the result. I bloody love this picture. It's a labour of love. Happy new year everyone! #Analemma

So.. Number 2 in #IansTop102022 was hard to choose. I wanted something to represent #Matariki this year. The Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption in Tonga has made for some incredible sunsets and sunrises this year, thanks to the huge amount of aerosols dumped high in the atmosphere. so when choosing my Matariki pic I chose one from June 22nd, as seen from Papanui Inlet on the Otago Peninsula. The colours! Oh the colours! #matariki #beauty

There were two lunar eclipses visible from New Zealand this year. Number 3 in #IansTop102022 features a picture I took during the eclipse of 9th November. The moon was soooo far north that it hung low over Otago Harbour. The Pleiades (Matariki) was nearby. But the colour during the eclipse was gorgeously red. What an amazing night! #eclipse #moon

Down to number 4 in #IansTop102022 When you get to my age (56) you get set in your ways. Yes, pale, male and stale (!) Some photographers climb mountains with powerful flashlights on their heads to shoot selfies with auroras (with aforementioned flashlights featuring prominently... yuck!) people like me just adore the sky. We head to our favourite spots and shoot lovely auroras. No flashlights, no head torches. No humans.Just beauty & sublime reflections. #aurora #beauty

Well it's New Year's Eve, so it's time to resume the countdown in #IansTop102022 I know you are all excited. Anyway, back in January, there was an amazing comet visible to the naked eye in our wonderful southern sky. Its name? Leonard. No really. Here's a pic I took of C/2021 A1 Leonard from a viewing sight south of Brighton Otago. I particularly like the colours you can see here. White(ish) from the dust tail, blue(ish) from the ion tail and lovely green from the comet's coma #comet #beauty

Tune in tomorrow, New Year's Eve for the unmissable top five in #IansTop102022 Meanwhile, on another note, I should mention that yesterday I snuck in another all day solar graph picture. This is a 6 hour exposure with a pinhole camera facing a mirror. I'm probably the only person in the world who is amused by a pinhole camera selfie. #solargraph #pinholecamera

So we have reached number 6 in (what i am sure) is the dullest pre-new year countdown ever that is #IansTop102022 Still. Let's soldier on. It was the night of 1st April 2022. I was lead astronomer on a charter flight aboard a Dreamliner which left Christchurch at 7pm to try and spend some time beneath Earth's southern auroral oval. We left Christchurch at 7pm and flew into a rather nice auroral storm. This was the view from my window at 9:19pm. What a night! #aurora #AuroraAustralis

Here's no. 7 in #IansTop102022 (Which was wrongly named #ianstopten2022 in my 1st toot because I had a brain fart.) Anyway this one was fun. On 17th July I was on board NASA's SOFIA Observatory on what turned out to be her last ever southern hemisphere science flight. I was there to commission a NZ (Otago Museum) designed camera platform to photograph the aurora australis (more later) Anyway, one of the crew asked if I wanted to sit on the flight deck for take off... well duh! AWESOME! #awesome

We are counting down my favourite ten images of 2022 in #IansTop102022 Number 8 was taken on the night of 3rd April 2022. It is a 30 minute exposure showing star trails above the dome of the 0.6M B&C telescope at the University of Canterbury's Mount John Observatory. We are looking North and the lovely green colour isn't an aurora. It is caused by an intense display of airglow. What a night! #airglow #astronomy #NewZealand

So here's number ten in the annoyingly uncapitalised #ianstop102022 An image taken during a gentle aurora on 10th April. Moonlight kept the sky quite bright, but the sky was clear, there was no wind and the reflections were amazing! #Aurora #AuroraAustralis

@iangriffin capitalisation of hashtags helps here. #IanStop102022

This year, lightroom tells me I took 37,052 images in 2022. Over the next couple of days I will be counting down my ten favourites in what I'm calling #ianstop102022 This one didn't quite make the cut but I couldn't resist sharing it. This is an image of the Aurora Australis taken at 01:42 on 2nd April 2022 from a Dreamliner some 2000km south of New Zealand #aurora #auroraaustralis