It's easy being green

Increasingly, Australians are becoming conscious consumers, paying greater attention to their impact on the environment as a result of the products they purchase. Sustainable practice is at the heart of this awareness, as a trend towards recycled materials, fair trade, organic farming and renewable energy sources continues to grow. Since 2009, with the aid of Australian government initiatives and incentives, the movement towards energy efficiency has been strong.

Despite constant debate, solar power is consistently proven to be a reliable, clean and affordable means of energy efficiency. Solar power works by capturing the sun's energy to generate electricity, a much cleaner way of gathering power than traditional black power.  According to the Australian Government Department of Industry and Science, as of February 2015 more than 1.36 million rooftop systems have been installed across Australia.

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer

Xara Photo & Graphic Design has a deceptively simplistic design: tools are located on the left, layers on the right. Experienced users of photo-editing tools will find themselves at home with Designer's toolset, but its friendly Ul conceals a plethora of tools - so many that less experienced some may find it a steep learning curve.

Designer's non-destructive integrated photo tool very useful, especially for quick, simple edits. This is your one-stop-shop for all photo-editing essentials, all of which can be adjusted manually or via presets.

Camera Bits Photo Mechanic 5 for Mac

Whatever area of photography you work in, or even if you're only just starting out in the field of photography, having a decent organiser tool at your disposal will reap untold benefits for your workflow. Applications like Adobe Lightroom or Bridge do the job well enough, but Photo Mechanic 5 truly excels as a photo organiser.

This software is purely for organising your images; aside from rotation and cropping, you won't find any image-editing tools here. But it will take you through every step of the image-organising process, right from when you extract the images. It starts with the Ingest process. Use this to import from multiple cards simultaneously and modify your images' keywords, captions, IPTC data. Mechanic uses IPTC Stationary Pads and variables to make the process more flexible, so you can write contact and copyright information too.

Sigma 20mm f 1.4 DG HSM A

Designed to compete with the best autofocus lenses from the camera makers, Sigma's Art-series lenses are setting new benchmarks, but as the company expands the range, each model becomes a tough act to follow. Ultra-wides are difficult to produce to a high standard at the best of times and high-speed models are harder still.

Perhaps the biggest problem is retaining affordability. With a list price of £849 it's still quite an investment, but you're getting one of the fastest 20mm lenses available.

Sony FE 90mm f2.8 Macro G OSS

Sony's full-frame mirrorless models are wonderfully lightweight and compact. but the body is only half the equation. While the collaboration with Zeiss has delivered some equally compact models, this new lens is at odds with the small size of the bodies. Despite the size, it handles well on the Sony
a7R body used during testing.

Ergonomics are generally good and there's no lens extension, but some aspects could divide opinion. A large focus-hold button and the controls for the built-in stabiliser and focus limiter fall naturally under your left thumb, but the push-pull feature of the focus ring for de-clutching the AF mechanism is the kind of thing you'll either love or hate. Still, the manual focus ring has hard stops at either end, even if it focuses past infinity, as lenses like this are inclined to do. It also has a very short throw from the three-metre mark onwards, making manual focusing on distant scenes quite tricky.

360fly

The 360fly is one of many newly released 360 cameras, so it's becoming clear that this new trend is here to stay. However, what's not so clear is whether these 360 capabilities are just a gimmick to drive sales or if they are actually a worthwhile investment.

Looking like a sci-fi eyeball in coal grey, the 360fly is packed with 32GB internal storage, a 1600mAh battery for up to two hours of HD shooting, 1500x1500 30fps filming and waterproofing up to five metres. The 360fly holds some prospects for the discerning 360 videographer as well as 360 filming in general, but. this being the first incarnation of the 360f ly, the more you use it, the more it becomes evident that it's missing something.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ80

Small but mighty, Panasonic's latest compact comes with a 30x optical zoom and the latest 4K technology, packaged in an attractive retro design. The camera feels very well made, with grips in all the right places for comfortable shooting. There's a bright three-inch LCD that's easy to view in sunny conditions, and it's the first in the line-up to feature touchscreen capability. You can tap to focus anywhere on screen, as well as make adjustments to settings, which considerably speeds up the shooting process.

The only thing letting the LCD down is that it's fixed. We've grown so used to vari-angle screens, which really do help when composing high and low-angle shots, particularly with street photography. There's also a small but serviceable EVF, but it's awkwardly positioned in the top left-hand corner. This means that the eye sensors can easily be accidentally activated by your finger while trying to frame a shot. Thankfully, you can turn this feature off if you prefer.

Olympus PEN-F

You've got to hand it to Olympus. From the original digital PEN released in 2009 to this 2016 re-imagining in the PEN-F, it certainly knows how to make lovely looking cameras that convincingly marry the analogue and the digital.

More than any digital model from this manufacturer before it, the PEN-F delights in tactile rangefinder-style dials and knobs, located on the top plate, the front and the rear, where they can be readily accessed via fingers and thumbs of both hands. In this respect the camera's handling is similar to the Fujifilm X-Pro2. The Olympus is, however, more compact, portable and less brick-like, while
also being some £300 cheaper.

Nikon Coolpix P900

The Nikon P900 is the largest camera in the test, and is in fact larger than some CSCs and entry-level DSLRs with a kit lens attached. However this size facilitates the huge zoom range of 83x, which the P900 boasts - the longest zoom length currently available on the market at the time of writing.

A large and chunky grip on the front of the camera, along with the large lens makes the camera sit proudly in your hands just as a DSLR would.

Panasonic Lumix FZ1000

The FZ1000 is one of the two cameras here to feature a one-inch sensor, which it couples with a flexible zoom range. It's pretty large and bulky, and with a viewfinder sitting in the middle of the top plate, it's also reminiscent of a DSLR. The grip is substantially chunky, with an indent to help your finger sit particularly comfortably.

Indeed, the dials and button layout on this camera is very reminiscent of something from the G-series CSC range, and are large and well spaced out. There's four customisable function buttons, while dials can also be changed to suit your particular way of working.

Olympus Stylus 1S

The smallest camera on test, the Stylus 1S shares a lot of its looks with the retro-cool Olympus PEN and OM-D, the company's Compact System Cameras. The screen on the back is touch-sensitive, while it tilts to be useful for some awkward-angle shots. You can set the autofocus point with a simple tap. while it's also possible to navigate through menus and so on.

There's also a number of dials and buttons on the camera, many of which can be customised to suit your specific shooting requirements and how you like to work. Because of the camera's small size, the grip is relatively shallow, and it's not as comparable to using a DSLR as the others on test here.

Canon PowerShot G3 X

Canon has a range of five different cameras in its well-respected G-series. The G3 X uses the same sensor as found in G5 X and the G7 X. but a more extensive zoom range and larger body styling places it in prime bridge camera territory. It's also one of the two cameras here that features a one-inch sensor which should translate well for image quality.

The camera itself has a chunky grip, with a textured covering that gives it a sense of quality as well as making it feel secure in the hand. The screen at the rear of the camera tilts, making it useful for a variety of awkward shooting positions. The screen is also touch-sensitive and can be used for a variety of operations, including setting autofocus point, and navigating the quick menu.

Failed stars and super-Jupiters

The brown dwarf is seen as a stellar failure, a dropout from the school of star formation. These gigantic objects with their puffy gaseous outer layers, are the universe's students that didn't quite make the grade. You see, in brown dwarfs, nuclear fusion - the process that gives stars their power - has given up the ghost, leaving them relatively cold and some no hotter than the human body. Neither planet nor star, brown dwarfs fall into the grey area between the most massive gas giant planets like Jupiter (which is why they're known as 'super Jupiters' because of their massive, gaseous nature) and the smallest stars. Their existence blurs the lines between what is a planet and what is a star and forces us to question the differences between how planets and stars form.

Stars form when clouds of molecular gas collapse under gravity and condense until the pressure and temperature at the centre of the collapsing cloud is so great, that nuclear fusion reactions - which turn nuclei of the element hydrogen into the heavier helium nuclei - ignite. This kind of top-down formation is one of the key differences between how stars and planets form. Meanwhile, the worlds of our Solar System and many others that astronomers have been studying over the past 20 years form through a bottom-up process, where a core gradually builds up, becoming bigger and bigger For the most massive planets, the core has enough gravity to begin stealing gas from the proto-stellar nebula around it, and this is where gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn got their hefty atmospheres.

Hidden universe

If we just relied on our eyes, we'd find that we would be blind to most of what the universe has to offer. There would be so much that we would completely miss, from the explosive nature of gamma-ray bursts, to the dusty skeletons of galaxies and even the radiation left behind by the Big Bang. This is because the universe emits light that goes well and truly beyond what our eyes alone can see. Visible light, which is the light that we see making up our everyday surroundings, is just one small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This runs all the way from low-energy radio waves through to astonishingly high-energy gamma rays. To us, anything that's regarded as outside of the visible part of the spectrum, we just can't see. You might be surprised to learn that we produce this hidden light on Earth too. Think of infrared night vision goggles, the X-rays you might get to see a broken arm with, ultraviolet security tags or radio waves transmitting music and telephone calls across the planet. In space, these other wavelengths of light are everywhere, coming from all kinds of cosmic objects. It's like a hidden universe, but luckily for us, astronomers are able to tune in to these other wavelengths to make the invisible visible.

Light is a funny thing, it is able to act like both a wave and a particle at the same time. This is why we say that a photon of light can have a wavelength. The longest wavelengths are radio waves, which range from a millimetre in length to many kilometres.

Star quakes

What does a star sound like? It might seem like a strange questioa but every star in the sky is generating sound waves, even if we can't hear them across light years of vacuum. What's more, these stellar waves have frequencies much too low for human hearing - periods of minutes to hours, compared to the 20 to 20,000 cycles per second our ears can pick up.

In effect, these sound waves are the same as the seismic waves that are known to cause earthquakes on our own planet Most earthquakes are triggered in Earth's relatively thin outer oust In a similar fashion, stellar seismic waves are generated by the churning of huge masses of gas in the upper layers, close to a star's visible surface. Both types of wave ripple out in all directions, passing all the way through either planet or star. These similarities mean that just as geologists can use seismic waves to probe Earth's inner structure, astronomers are now finding that sound waves can reveal the inner secrets of the stars.

Supernovas

Stars are large and volatile masses of energy, finely balanced to allow their existence to continue while also emitting large .amounts of energy into their surroundings. Their very presence is one of the wonders of the universe, with these giant hot and dense balls of gas able to survive the harsh reality of space. But when the finely-tuned balance of gravity and pressure within a star is altered, something rather remarkable often happens. Try to imagine an explosion more powerful than a billion suns, and you might start to understand how stars can meet their explosive end when they go supernova.



In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers were astounded when a new star appeared in trfe night sky for 1 eight months. The star appeared from nowhere and was stationary, ruling out the possibility of it being a comet. Although unknown at the time, those Chinese astronomers (and possibly Roman astronomers around the same period as well) unwittingly became the first people to record a supernova, which we know today as SN 185. In 2006, NASA's Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray observatories imaged a remnant called RCW 86, a vast shell of gas seerningry ejected by SN 185. It might have taken 2,000 years, but we're gradually becoming able to observe and understand these massive events like never before.

What are asteroids made of?

Protecting Earth is one of the main reasons why scientists keep a close eye on asteroids, which are space rocks of all shapes and sizes that can be found scattered throughout the Solar System.

It's unclear how meteoroids, the rocks that become meteors when they crash into Earth's atmosphere, were generated from asteroids. Still, NASA isn't ruling a link out and is examining asteroids to learn more about how the Solar System was formed.

How planets form

In a sense, planetary birth is a side effect of a larger birth: the formation of a star. Stars form from nebulas, massive clouds of gas and dust dominated by hydrogen and helium. Now and then, a disturbance in a nebula concentrates an area of gas and dust into a denser knot of material If the knot is big enough and dense enough, it will exert enough gravitational pull to collapse in on itself. The huge volume of super-dense gas concentrates at the knot's centre, and the gravitational energy heats it up to form a protostar. With sufficient mass, the energy of the protostar increases, eventually initiating a nuclear fusion reaction and graduating to a proper star.

Meanwhile, according to the solar nebula theory, surrounding gas and dust form a protoplanetary disc, or proplyd, around the protostar. When the protostar first begins to form, the surrounding material is still an unordered, slowly churning cloud. But the protostar's growing gravitational pull accelerates the cloud's movement, causing it to swirl around the centre.

Winds at twice the speed of sound

We've all got stuck out in or witnessed very strong winds here on Earth, from gusts that turn your umbrella inside out to tornadoes that rip up everything in their path. You might think these winds are a force to be reckoned with, but unless you've had a day floating around the gaseous atmosphere of ice giant Neptune you haven't seen anything yet!



You might think that Neptune's distance from the Sun. which creates temperatures as low as -218 degrees Celsius (-360 degrees Fahrenheit), would mean a world frozen solid by the subzero climate with not much going on in terms of weather. However, you would be incorrect. The winds that race through its hydrogen, helium and ammonia-laden atmosphere can reach maximum speeds of around 2,400 kilometres per hour (1.500 miles per hour), making this dark horse probably the most violently stormy world in the Solar System, and making our most powerful winds look like light breezes.

Hurricanes bieeer than Earth

Easily one of the most famous storms in the Solar System, Jupiter's Great Red Spot is so large that it is visible through many Earth-based telescopes.

The Great Red Spot is thought to have been in existence for at least 340 years. The oval red eye rotates in an anticlockwise direction due to the crushing high pressure on the planet. Winds can reach over 400 kilometres per hour (250 miles per hour) around the spot, however, inside the storm they seem to be nearly nonexistent. And that's not all, this complicated weather system has an average temperature of about -162 degrees Celsius (-260 degrees Fahrenheit).