November/December 2024: The planets; The Little Sombrero Galaxy; Venus in the evening twilight.

19th December - the Solar System.

Time to test out my newly cleaned telescope mirror and re-collimation. In truth it was too windy for planetary imaging (with my kit anyway), but with a biggish moon rising well before midnight I thought it was the best bet.
Here's a pictorial summary:

The planets are all imaged with the same magnification and are ordered in the way they currently appear in the sky.
Starting on the right at 16:38, with Venus:
When I initially set up the telescope, just before sunset, Venus looked steadier than I expected in the eyepiece. By the time I had attached two cameras (and made all other necessary connections and adjustments) it had drifted west and down so was sitting over the row of houses down the road in some really poor seeing.
The image somewhat reflects this.
Venus is really bright (magnitude -4.3). It's only 126 million km away at the moment and shrouded in a reflective covering of cloud. It will continue to brighten as it approaches the Earth, peaking around the 20th February 2025. By that time, it will be only 58 million km away and its apparent diameter will be close to that of Jupiter. It will be showing quite a thin crescent though.
Venus has a diameter of about 12000 km (compared to the Earths 12750 km).
Moving eastwards, 17:10, Saturn:
I had expected Saturn to be in far steadier air as it was higher in the sky and had not yet reached the destroyer of all seeing that is the houses down the street. My expectations were optimistic.
Saturn is easily naked eye visible at magnitude 1, but, unless you are familiar enough with the constellations to know that there isn't a magnitude 1 star there, it is easy to overlook. It's a big planet, 117000 km in diameter, but a long way away, about 1500 million km.
Further East, 17:38, Neptune:
With a magnitude of 7.8 Neptune is only just visible with the maximum exposure for my planetary camera. This led to issues processing the images, which I won't dwell on, save to say that the size of the planet in the image is the order of 30% bigger than one might expect. Neptune is less than half the size of Saturn at 49500 km, and much further away 4470 million km. Radio communication to Neptune would spend over 4 hours in transit.
Neptune is noticeably blue.
Looking East South East now, 18:09, Uranus:
At magnitude 5.6 Uranus is notionally a naked eye visible object. I've never come close to seeing it with the naked eye, even back in a less light polluted era. It's bright enough to be an easy object for the camera though. Uranus is a greenish gassy lump slightly bigger than Neptune at 51000 km, and much closer at 2800 million km.
The real target for the evenings observing was Jupiter, the solar system combo above features the image from 20:33:
Jupiter is huge, 143000 km in diameter, and relatively close, 616 million km. The image includes the moons Io, visible above the right edge of disk of Jupiter with its shadow to the left, and Ganymede to the left of Jupiter.
Finally, 23:31, Mars:
Really bright, really red, Mars is just 6792 km is diameter (not much over half Earth size) and is a mere 104 million km away. The closest thing we've looked at. The polar cap in the northern hemisphere is its most obvious feature.

As Jupiter was the main target of the evening, here's an animation covering the nearly 5 hours I was looking at it (18:18 to 23:10):

It starts out in some poor seeing with Io on the left of the planet. Io moves west, passing in front of the disk of Jupiter. With Io just on the disk, but before its shadow is visible, Ganymede emerges from Jupiter's shadow. By the time Io leaves the disk of Jupiter, the seeing is pretty good.

25th November - Caldwell 43 "the Little Sombrero galaxy" again.

Back on 10th of October my imaging attempt at C43 was rather spoilt by bright Aurora. I had another go on the 23rd of October, taking lots on nice images in good skies. The camera wouldn't read the SD card in the morning, so I had to reformat it and lost all the pictures. I managed to avoid those problems on the 25th November. It was quite windy though, I rejected about 10% of frames because of telescope movement, and it was not as transparent as the night on the 25th October.
(Click/tap to big).

C43, or NGC 7814, is a spiral galaxy about the size of our milky way with a prominent dust lane. It is about 40 million light years aways, but sits in region of sky where far more distant galaxies can be seen. I've marked some of these on the small image (the closer ones). If you click/tap the image to big it, the text disappears.
It's a harder thing to image than I expected - hence the excessive background ''noise'.

11th and 21st November - Venus is brightening.

I became aware that I hadn't got a scenic image this year. As an emergency picture, I got a shot of a now really bright Venus at Berry Fen, on the 11th November (with the Sony camera on a tripod). 10 days later, while walking with Pip Wigan, I thought I would take another with the phone camera, with Venus over the magnificent edifice that is Bluntisham Village Hall.
(Click/tap to big the images).



Venus will carry on brightening for a while, on the 4th and 5th of December a crescent Moon will be close by.

On the 11th, I was going to continue my astronomy imaging with some planetary pictures. Turned out the telescope had gone badly out of collimation (with the recent freezing temperatures it hadn't seen for a while I guess).
It was fairly obvious from the Saturn images that it wasn't worth continuing.


It was just about possible to get a passable image of the Moon with a focal length of 1000mm rather than 3300mm:

(Click/tap to big the images).

That's the end of the November/December images.

Remember, you can see the best images from previous years in earlier posts on this blog.