Mikes astronomy images 2025

December 2025

Christmas Day - the Christmas tree cluster!

Up really early on Christmas day to take this picture of NGC 2264, aka 'the Christmas Tree Cluster".
Click/tap to go to a bigger image.

The question is 'where is the Xmas tree?'. Is it the bright blue patch near the top with the great big white bauble on top? Is it the silhouetted conical shape bottom left?
Nasa provides the answer in this webpage in which some Nasa employee had some right good fun with colours.
Turns out it's the whole thing, and my image is upside down (for Xmas tree purposes anyway). A bit like this...

but it's worth following the Nasa link above for a better interpretation, and also some information on the object.

In addition to not really knowing where the Xmas tree was in the image, prior to taking the image above I managed to point the SeeStar at the wrong object, NGC 2169.
Took me a while to realise the image wasn't turning out like I expected.

For some reason this is called the "37 Cluster".

19th December - Jupiter, Saturn and the Embryo Nebula

In the afternoon of the 19th. I cleaned the telescope mirrors and recollimated it (again, had to because I had removed the mirrors). Let's see how it did....
Here's the best images of Jupiter and Saturn:

This is a 100% resolution image, but this time I had set the focal length to around 6.7 metres, rather than the 5 metres I have been using recently. There are pros and cons to this, which I won't go into here.
A decent picture of Jupiter for me. the moon on the left is Europa. Still struggling a bit with Saturn, but this is the best picture I've taken for a while. At least you can tell in this image that the dark line across the disk of the planet is (mostly) the shadow of the ring system - you can see that it sits just above the line of the rings.
Here's a 150% resolution version, where this is probably easier to see...


I've mentioned the Galilean moon Europa, there were a couple of other moons visible in the frame, Ganymede and Io, at the beginning and end of the session I took a wider angle movie to see these.
Here's the result at 50% resolution:

And here's the rotation of Jupiter, with an image every 15 minutes (approximately) over the session. This is 67% full resolution.



In the gap between imaging Saturn and Jupiter I set the SeeStar up taking pictures of NGC 1333, the Embryo nebula in Perseus. I got two hours' worth of exposures centred on its peak altitude of 69 degrees.
Here's the picture, click/tap to go to a bigger version.

NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula in the Perseus molecular cloud, about 960 light years away. Like a number of other reflection nebula, the full extent of nebulosity can be seen by the absence of background stars around the bright bit in the middle. See, for example, this image of the Iris Nebula , or this of the Cocoon Nebula .

13th December - Horse Head Nebula and friends, a Geminid meteor

The images here were all taken between ten to one and just after three in the morning of the 13th.
Let's start with a surprisingly good image of the Horse Head Nebula (IC 434, or B 33 in the Bernard catalogue of dark nebula). Here's the image, you can click/tap it to go to a better resolution version (well worth it).

The more orange nebula on the left is the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024), and the white nebula centre is NGC 2023. These are all part of the vast Orion molecular cloud around 1400 light years away. The big white blob between the Flame Nebula and the red that makes up the background to the horses' head is the star Alnitak, the left most star of the belt of Orion. This is much closer at around 800 light years.
The picture was taken with the SeeStar50 with a total exposure time of 47 minutes. I then used the SeeStars' AI denoise feature to generate nearly the final image (I upped the colour saturation a bit afterwards).

Here's an animated comparison of a picture I took back in January 2023, the non-denoised SeeStar image, December 2025, and the AI denoised version, cropped around the horse head.

I do wonder about the AI denoising, it's not visible in the 50% sized animation above, but if you examine the full resolution version by clicking the first image, there is a straight-line artefact in the horses' left shoulder!

Meanwhile I had set up the Somy camera with a wide angle (16mm) lens tracking the area around Gemini downwards with the hope of seeing a bunch of Geminid Meteors. The peak of the shower was meant to be late on the evening of the 13th to early morning on the 14th. I was a day early, but the shower is described as having a broad peak.
I didn't notice any meteors whenever I was outside, but I wasn't outside for long so wasn't concerned. I got 321 15 second exposes between 00:51 and 02:19 (88 minutes). You may notice that 321 x 15 seconds is just over 80 minutes, so 10% of the time has been lost, and I'm not sure how!
In the 321 images spanning 80 minutes, there was only one meteor. It was a nailed on Geminid though:
(Click/tap to big the image)

The bright star bottom right is Sirius, the brightest star in the sky at magnitude -1.45. This is the "dog" star, in Canis Major. The bright star centre image is Procyon, magnitude 0.4 in Canis Minor. Moving up, the big white blob is Jupiter, currently magnitude -2.6. Then the two bright stars above this are the twins in Gemini, Pollux the lower one at magnitude 1.15 and above this Castor at magnitude 1.9. Just up and to the right of Castor is the radiant of the Geminid meteor shower. If you imagine a line extended upwards from the line of the meteor it goes bang on through the radiant.
If you look left and down a bit from Jupiter you can the Beehive Cluster in Cancer.
The image above is a 50-50 merge of the single image containing the Geminid, and a stack of all 321 frames. If I hadn't put that single frame in the tree would just be blur, as the camera moved around tracking the stars.

9th/10th December - Crab Nebula, Fossil Footprint Nebula, NGC 1961 (again), the Sun and Saturn (again)

Two clear nights on the Met office forecast, so out with the 'scope again. There was going to be quite a stiff breeze both nights, stronger on the 9th, so I elected to do some deep sky imaging on the 9th, and move on to some planetary stuff on the 10th when the wind was a tadge lighter.
The plan for the 9th was the galaxy NGC 1961 with the 1000mm focal length 'scope and Sony camera, and the Nebula NGC 1491 (the Fossil Footprint) with the SeeStar. I set up the big 'scope and started imaging NGC 1961. I was a bit concerned while setting up by the regular gusts which would rattle the 'scope around a bit. I moved on to set the SeeStar pointing at NGC 1491. It told me it couldn't point at it because it was over 85 degrees in altitude (or it couldn't do the goto, it may have been able to point to it afterwards).
I was going to have to wait till 23:30 for it to drop below 85 degrees, so instead I pointed it at the Crab Nebula (the supernova remnant M1).
Here's a picture:

This is not wholly from the SeeStar. I was a bit surprised by what it produced because it didn't really look like previous images I've taken of this object. Here's the picture that SeeStar produced, in comparison with one from December 2020:

The first picture is a combination of the two above, 40% to 60% in favour of the SeeStar image for the red channel, 75% to 25% in favour of the 2020 image for the green and blue channels.
You can choose which of these three you prefer. Also, you can see a better resolution version for the 2020 image here.

Meanwhile imaging of NGC1961 was continuing, sort of. The BBC weather forecast indicated the presence of more cloud than the Met Office. This turned out to be true, and I aborted the imaging after about 45 minutes (I had hoped for more like 1hr 20min).
When examining the images before stacking, I whittled down 93 images to 55, either because of cloud or telescope movement in the gusts.
No worries, here's the image, you can click/tap it to go to a better resolution version.

Ok, not a great result. I've cropped it to look a bit like the image from the SeeStar on 25th November if you want scroll down and do the comparison. Also, there's more info on all the galaxies you can see there.

It didn't seem from the cloud radar that it was going to clear up by 11:30 when NGC 1491 was going to be low enough for the SeeStar to find, so I went to bed for a bit. At 1:00 on the 10th, I was outside again, setting up to get the images. Having seen the SeeStar find the target, I went back to bed and set the alarm for 2:00.
It had, I think, been clear all that time, but for the last ten minutes of SeeStars imaging, the target had been behind the house.
Not a bad result though, click/tap to big the image.

NGC 1491 is an emission nebula in Perseus, around 10,000 light years. Only the bright central region would have been visible if I took this with the Sony camera. For the image here I would estimate this is about 14 light years across. The part of this image you would identify as belonging to the nebula would be about 60 light years across, but images taken with tens of hours exposure time show that the nebula is far bigger than this, the whole frame is in fact just a part of the nebula.


I had brought the telescope back inside when I first gave up, but left the mount attached to the pier, all nicely polar aligned. So it didn't take long just after lunch on the 10th to attach the scope and point it straight at the Sun (with a suitable filter of course).
You may recall the SeeStar image of the Sun from the 2nd December, and the nice group of sunspots on the East side. In the 8 days since these have made their way across the disc of the sun and will soon disappear on the West limb. The solar rotation period is between 25 and 26 days close the equator, but increases for regions closer to the poles. For the spots in question, it could be as much as 30 days, I would have to a bit more research to find out.
Here's the image, taken with the Sony camera and 1000mm focal length 'scope:
Click/tap to big (worth looking at the big version).

And here a close up of the spots taken with the QHY camera and focal length of around 5000mm.

Not as crisp as I had hoped, but if you watch the video from which this image was generated, I'm amazed it is as good as it is. The Sun was only 13.5 degrees high at the time. That's a lot of atmosphere to look through on a windy day. It was nearly a degree higher on the 2nd, on a much stiller day.
It's interesting to see just how much those stops have changed in the 8 days. If it's going to be clear for a week in the spring when the Sun is a bit higher, and there is a suitable sunspot target I might get a set of day-by-day images.

So the plan was to try and get a Jupiter image much later in the evening when it was far enough over the trees. I did a warmup with Saturn again:


No sign of any improvement in these images (I had completely re-collimated the 'scope - eyepiece draw tube, secondary mirror and primary mirror).
The bright moon on the right is Titan (not surprisingly). There is a faint cloud of brighter pixels between Titan and Saturn which is probably the moon Dione. It's a cloud because I couldn't see it on a single frame and never associated an alignment point with it.

Soon after the last Saturn image was taken, and in contradiction to the Met Office forecast, a large swathe of cloud formed between the two bog standard arcs of cloud, in the gap that was meant to be the clear spell. It was interesting to watch this happening on the cloud radar. Jupiter imaging was abandoned.

3rd December - Saturn, Moon

Back on the 21st of November I suggested I would avoid Saturn until the rings had widened a bit (in the new year). I've given up on that promise and tried a different camera and smaller focal length.
No sign of any improvement. Here's Saturn pasted onto an image of part of the Moon (taken shortly before the Saturn imaging).
Click/tap go to a bigger version.

The biggest crater in the image is Curtius, 96kn across (from my house to the other side of Grantham on the A1). Saturn's ring system, which appears a similar size in the image is about 280,000 km across.
Here's an indication (the yellow box) of the part of the Moon shown above:

Moon image here from Stellarium.

2nd December - Sun, Coat Hanger, Comet

Let's move the SeeStar seamlessly from the Moon (29th November) to the Sun.
There are some nice big sunspots ambling their way across. Could be good for Aurora next week maybe.
Click the overly red image to go to a bigger not red version.

Or, if you just want to see the spots, here they are:

A bit about using the SeeStar to get these images:
I set the thing up as usual (with the addition of adding the solar filter that was supplied with the device), and asked it to point to the Sun. This appeared to be taking a while, so I just left it for a bit. When I looked again, it had stopped, just pointing in the vague direction of the Sun. I tried again. This time it complained about its compass setting, and took me through a process of calibrating its compass which involved rotating the thing through 360 degrees a surprising number of times. It then complained about its level, and asked me to level it, with the aid of a handy display on the phone. It then found the Sun, not particularly quickly, but without issue.
I took one 'photo', and two movies.

The photo must have been multiple exposures, because of the time it took, and the quality of the resulting image.
The overly red image is a one third size version of the resulting jpg.

The image of just the sunspots came from a movie I took after selecting a x2 magnification. It looks like a x2 magnification on your phone, but in reality, it isn't. All that happens is you get a cropped movie, each frame being half the size of the movie you get with the standard x1 magnification. This at least reduces that size of the movie.
Another thing that reduces the movie size is the fact that it's an mp4 file which will use lossy compression :(
The movie was converted to AVI in PIPP, stacked in AutoStakkert and sharpened in Registax6. I then looked at it in AstroArt6 and split it into Red Green and Blue channels. Red was the only thing that had anything in it, blue and green were just black. So the image you see is just the red channel as grey scale.

The other movie I took was at standard 1x "magnification", showing the full disk of the sun. I processed this in exactly the same way. The output from stacking and sharpening was horribly red as before, but this time in AstroArt6 detail was spread over the red and green channels! I just converted it to grey scale.


Later in the day......
Back on 25th of September I took a picture of the asterism Kembles Cascade with the Sony camera and 85mm lens. With the same lens on the 25th of October I imaged the by then rather faint comet C/2025 R6 SWAN. I had noticed recently that an even fainter comet, C/20225 T1 ATLAS, was close to the asterism "the Coat Hanger". Two for the price one, if I used the same lens I thought.

The Coat Hanger asterism is upside down, bottom left. Rather like Kembles Cascade it becomes less obvious the more faint stars you see around it. It's more obvious in the image if you step away from it. The stars are too faint for it to be naked eye visible, but it's quite a nice binocular object.
The comet is top right, quite a bit fainter and smaller than I expected it to look, but the imaging took place with a big fat Moon quite high in the sky. I've added a magnified box on the image to aid in its identification.

November 2025

29th November - The Moon

Let's finished off the month with the SeeStars view of the Moon.
Click/tap the image to see a full resolution version.

It's a nice enough picture, maybe quite good for a 250mm focal length. If you look at the full resolution version you will see that I've added images of Saturn (with Titan) and Neptune. These are pretty much what I would expect from the focal length.
All images were taken as video, and processed in AutoStakkert and Registax6. There appears to be no way to manually change the exposure time when using the SeeStar in that mode. Neither does it appear obvious how you can take a standard deep sky type stack having selected a solar system object (you could take a wodge of single photos).

25th November - NGC 1961

I had in mind the galaxy NGC 1961 as a target for the big 'scope and Sony camera. This spans a mere four by two and a quarter arc minutes, so I thought the big 'scope would definitely be the thing to use.
Here's the thing - despite the clear skies forecast on the Met Office and BBC websites, the cloud radar suggested otherwise. Certainly, there was well over 50% cloud cover when I went out to set up the 'scope. It takes between 40 minutes and an hour for me to set up the 'scope and start imaging. Back in the day I would have given up at this point, I've had too many occasions when basically all I've done is set up the 'scope then bring it back in again sometime later.
I did give up on the big 'scope, wandered back out again about 40 minutes later and spent three minutes setting up the SeeStar, then another 5 minutes or so before it had found the target, done all the horizontal calibration etc and started imaging. I left it imaging for about an hour. I went out a few times to check the cloud cover, when I went out the last time it appeared that the target had probably been behind some high cloud for a while, so I stopped the imaging.
I was surprised by how well the image turned out, given the resolution of the SeeStar. The image here is about a quarter of the full frame (NGC 1961 was centre frame), It's the quarter that includes a lot of other galaxies, and I've put labels next to these in the small picture.
If you click/tap the small picture you go to a full res version without the text.

Let's go through the galaxies identified:
NGC 1961: Distance 145 million light years. Diameter 240,000 light years. This is big, compared with 100,000 ly of our Milky Way.
PGC 17642: Distance 185 million light years (this is a red shift distance, it's almost exactly the same as the red shift distance for NGC 1961!). Diameter 70,000 light years.
PGC 17692: Distance 196 million light years (approximately!). Diameter 120,000 light years.
PGC 17675: Distance 176 million light years (approximately!). Diameter 138,000 light years.
PGC 17757: Distance 208 million light years (red shift distance). Diameter 88,000 light years.
PGC 17794: Distance 207 million light years (red shift) or 128 million otherwise! Diameter 55,000 light years, or much bigger if you use the red shift distance.
There are a couple of things marked in the image "?1" and "?2" which look like galaxies but are not identified as such in SKY-MAP.ORG, so no data for those.

The image was the first one for which I used the SeeStars AI denoise function. This isn't the AI that's being overhyped at the moment and comes up with all sorts of shite in a surprising number of PC applications. It will be one or more smart algorithms, none, one, or more of which may be based on limited neural net hardware which has been "trained". It certainly doesn't require an internet connection to run.
It produced a really impressive result, which I couldn't get close to when processing the fits file.
Click the image below to see a comparison of the original jpg from SeeStar, my attempt to process the fits file (with some denoising) and SeeStars AI denoised image.

Having said it did a really impressive job let's find a couple of minor gripes.
1) I think it has overblown the centres of the galaxies losing a bit of detail for NGC 1961 (it'ss always tricky to balance detail in the centre and detail round the edges when processing galaxies). But it's also overblown the bright stars as well, and a few dim stars close to the brightest stars/galaxies have been lost (the stars appear bigger than those in the original jpg or my processed image).
2) For the dimmer stars, I could find a couple pf places where their relative brightness in the AI denoise picture didn't seem to match what I saw in the jpg or my processed image, and one example which looks to me like it's just conjured a star up from the noise.
You can see the increase in star size, and the conjured star in this gif, which cycles through the standard SesStar jpg, my processing of the fits file and the SeeStar AI denoised file.

The conjured star is in the bottom right quarter. It so happens there is an 18.4 magnitude star in that position (just to the left and above the rightmost of two brighter stars close together). Above and to the left of these two stars there is a triangle of fainter stars. It so happens that this is actually a quadrilateral of stars, with an 18.4 magnitude star below the other three. In the original jpg, and in my processed image these two stars are left in the "are they there or not" state. In the AI denoise version, one is greatly enhanced, the other all but obliterated.

23rd November - The galaxy M33, and comet C/2025 R2 SWAN

The SeeStar is out again, pointing at a galaxy, the second closest, M33 in Triangulum, 2.7 million light years away. Despite its closeness I've always found it a difficult object to image. The SeeStar did it brilliantly.
(Click/Tap to go to a better resolution version)

The small image is a reduced version of a crop from the SeeStars jpg file. I found this a bit red, and processed the fits file myself. You see my processed image if you click the smaller one. Far more like the colours I expected. This is by far the best M33 picture I have taken, but it feels like I didn't take it, just pressed a few buttons and a little bit of fiddling the image right at the end.

Before I took the SeeStar image I had a go at Comet C/2025 R2 SWAN with the big telescope and Sony camera. I had taken a wide angle shot of this back on 25th October. It's now higher in the sky, but much further away. It didn't look much on the 25th October, but there was some evidence of a tail. I've waited too long to capture that, the comet is now far too far away from the Sun.
Here's a much-reduced full frame image, the comet is near the centre, the fuzzy line shows how far it had moved across the star field in the hour and 15 mins worth of imaging, not the actual shape of the comet.
Click/Tap to go to a better resolution cropped version.

In the better res version, you will have seen if you clicked the image, C/2025 R2 SWAN is on the left, on the right what originally looked like a star is now patently not one. It's the face on spiral galaxy NGC 7751, about 140 million light years away, about half the distance of the most distant galaxies you will see in these pages. It's about 70 thousand light years across, not huge. (The distance and size are derived from red shift data, there's a big error margin on these).
For comparison, SWAN was about 7 light minutes away.
There are actually two other galaxies you can see in the better res version, one very faint one just to the right of NGC 7751, and one towards the bottom of the bottom right corner. These are PGC 141134 (130 million ly) and PGC 1304741 (couldn't find any information on this one).
Finally, a picture of the comet with an attempt to stack the images with the comet in place, and let the stars trail:

There's a bit of fuzziness to the left which could be a tail, or a star behind the comet, or just poor comet positioning on my part (I had to do this manually and gave up after 71 of the 225 images).
Had the comet been bright enough, I could have got Deep Sky Stacker to do this automatically with just 2 manual identifications.

21st November - Saturn and the Ear Nebula (C 27 or NGC 6888)

Another go at Saturn, marginal improvement on last time:

The rings are even more edge on than last time, and are appearing very faint in this image. I'm going to leave Saturn alone till next year now I think.
I've included an excessively brightened image at the bottom because I detected a couple moons sitting in the ring system. These are Tethys on the left, and Dione right. They're not easy to see, but Tethys is definitely there, I could (just about) see it move as expected over time (the image here is the best of about 13 images spread over one and half hours).
One moon I could definitely see (in the live view as I was taking pictures) was the massive Titan. Here it is at the bottom left:

OK, that's not particularly bright either. No worries, I was going to get a wide angle shot of the ISS passing within a few degrees of Saturn. Whoops, just too late setting the camera up. Took the picture anyway, Neptune is in it!



While all this was happening, I had set the SeeStar up to image the Ear Nebula (Caldwell 27, or NGC 6888), an emission nebula about 5000 light years away and 30 light years across. The SeeStar chose to us the LP filter, and I couldn't manage to switch back to the standard one. I then found it impossible to generate an image of the quality of the jpg I got off the SeeStar from the fits file! Not sure what the SeeStar does when it is using the LP filter. So, here's the two jpg files from the SeeStar untouched.
Click/Tap the thumbnail to see the big one.

You may recall seeing this very nebula from my images of June 2024, taken with the Sony camera. Here's that picture.
The SeeStar image is better, but could do with a bit of noise reduction. I would normally do this in post-processing, there is an option to get the SeeStar to do it which I haven't tried yet.

20th November - The Monkey Head Nebula (NGC 2174)

Back on the 17th I ended with a comment saying I would only use the SeeStar for Deep Sky imaging at home if I wanted to do things quickly. With sub-zero temperatures at 2:30 in the morning I wanted to spend as short a time as possible outside setting up. So the SeeStar it was again!
The target is the Monkey Head Nebula, NGC 2174, in the top region of Orion, very close to the border with Gemini.
(Click/Tap to go to a better resolution version)

NGC 2174 is a emission nebula and star forming region (lots of things in Orion are star forming regions). At 6400 light years away, from this image I would estimate it to be more than 57 light years across.

There is another thing of interest in the image, in the top left quarter:

We are looking close to the zodiacal constellation of Gemini, so close to the ecliptic (the extended plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun). Lots of things orbit the Sun around this plane, including asteroids. Rollandia is one such thing, in the outer part of the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars it has an orbital period of around 4 years. It is the short straight line in the image. That's how far it has appeared to move across the sky in the hour and a bit it took to take the exposures.

I'll now witter on a bit more about the SeeStar. Unlike the IC 5146 picture the camera just opted for an IR cut filter rather than the 'Light pollution' filter. This made it far easier for me to bring out colours when processing the fits image.
The SeeStar I'm using has a 50mm diameter lens, implying a resolution of around 2.9 arc seconds for yellow light. Given the focal length of 250mm, and the surprisingly small pixel size of 2.9 microns, you end up with something just shy of 2.4 arc seconds/pixel. It's interesting to me to compare this to same numbers for the Sony camera on the 1000mm focal length 200mm diameter 'scope. The resolution is around 0.72 arc seconds, and the arc seconds/pixel is around 0.8. So, the arc seconds/pixel values for both setups are close to matching the resolution one would expect for the lens. The difference being that the resolution of the SeeStar is about 4 times poorer than that of the big 'scope/Sony combo. This is not as bad as it seems - I very rarely publish 100% resolution image for the big 'scope/Sony combo. The other thing worth mentioning is the size of the sensor on the SeeStar, it's a mere 5.6 x 3 mm (or thereabouts) compared to 23.5 x 15.6 mm for the Sony Camera. The result being that the field of view is actually less than the Sony camera on the 1000mm 'scope, though not by a huge amount. These two facts provide another reason why the big 'scope/Sony combo should be my default choice (when it warms up a bit).

17th November - Saturn and the Cocoon nebula (IC 5146)

After a disappointing image of Saturn from the 17th August I've eventually got round to having another go. This one is actually worse. I can only think it's dew on the optics, I was a bit late with the dew heater!

You'll notice the ring system is even more 'edge on' than it was in the August picture. Saturn is still continuing its retrograde motion across the constellations, going back to the normal West to East motion at the end of the month - when the rings will begin to widen.

The forecast for cloud cover was a bit ambiguous across websites, so I thought I would pack up the big 'scope and have a go at Deep Sky imaging with the SeeStar. I chose another target I had imaged before, IC 5146, and managed to get 27 minutes worth of exposures before the cloud was teetering round my target.
(Click/Tap to go to a better resolution version)

This time I did get the stacked fits fie off the SeeStar and post processed it myself, producing (I thought) a better jpg image than the one the SeeStar sent to my phone.
Here's the blurb on the Cocoon Nebula from last time I imaged it:
Caldwell 19 or IC 5146, aka the Cocoon Nebula, is a combination of emission/reflection nebula in Cygnus. The Milky Way runs through Cygnus, so this is a rich star field. Figures I have seen suggest the nebula is a mere 3200 light years distant, with a diameter of around 15 light years. From my image, the bright part for the nebula would be less than 10 light years across at that distance.
Click the link to see my previous image from the "Best of 2024" post.
Taken in June 2024, it's a far better image than the SeeStar, for a few reasons:
i) there may have been high cloud drifting over my target for the last 10 minutes that I never really noticed.
ii) the fact that the resolution of the SeeStar is just not as good as a 'scope that is 4 times the size.
iii) I think the SeeStar automatically used on what it call its LP filter, great for HI OIII emission wavelengths, maybe not that greater for anything else.
If it's going to be clear for hours, and I'm at home, my first choice for deep sky is always going to be the big 'scope and the Sony camera.
If I'm not at home, or I want to do things quickly, I'll have the SeeStar in its little box ready to go :)

8th November - The Dumbbell nebula (M27) and the Wizard nebula (NGC 7380) again - with a new camera!

For my regular trips up to Lancashire, and for occasional use at home, I purchased a SeeStar S50 automated astronomy telescope. This is basically a camera specifically designed for ease of use when photographing astronomy targets.
I actually first tried it out in Sheffield, in fairly light polluted skies - probably made less noticeable by the fact that there was a well risen big gibbous 18 day old Moon. So, actually, a good test.
I chose a fairly easy first target, M27 - the Dumbbell nebula.
Here's a crop of the image. If you click/tap the image you can cycle between this and a comparison image of the same nebula taken in October 2018 with my old EOS camera and 1000mm focal length 'scope, in a darker sky with a 4 day old Moon well below the horizon.

The new SeeStar image is the brighter, redder one. This was only 10 minutes total exposure time (the 2018 version was only 15min).

I thought it might be cute to combine these images and get a bit more blue into the SeeStar image....

I quite like this.

My next target was going to be more difficult and require a longer exposure. It was NGC 7380, the thing I imaged on the 25th October.
This image alternates between the 55 minute exposure SeeStar picture, and the 62 minute exposure from October. If you Click/Tap to big it you go to a 100% resolution version of the SeeStar image.

The October picture is the one that only partially fills the frame.
Like the Dumbbell nebula picture there is more detail in the faint red stuff (and more of it) in the SeeStar image than in the images taken with the non-astro EOS and Sony cameras. You can see this if you click the image above to go to the better res version. Also like M27, the SeeStar doesn't seem that great at picking out blue.

Let's do a quick review of the SeeStar:

"Commissioning" and connecting to your phone:
To be honest, I found the documentation poor, but I did manage this successfully without major hiccups. I downloaded the App from the QR code supplied, and my phone complained about the potential security hazards of installing from the download file. I carried on regardless. At some point I was asked to accept the fact that some data may be shared with various URLs which all seemed to have names suggesting they were located in China. Since I intended to run the App without an internet connection I continued. I connected with no location facilities enabled and mobile data off. So when I connected to SeeStars wifi there was no internet connection. I noticed at some point that I had the option of entering my latitude and longitude. I'm not sure if the device has its own GPS or whether it relies on my phone, it could be that because I was inside the device itself could not find a GPS signal. Overall, I was not particularly optimistic after this first go at connecting to the device.

Setting up for Astronomy imaging, the first/second GoTo:
I took the precaution of buying a level adjustment gizmo at the same time as I bought the SeeStar. This fits between the supplied tripod and the SeeStar itself. I plonked the tripod on a sloping driveway, attached the level adjust gizmo and set the level. Very straight forward, but phone camera torch required. I then screwed the SeeStar onto the gizmo and connected the phone App via the SeeStars wifi (much more straight forward second time around). I then selected astronomy imaging. I noticed that the SeeStar had found my correct latitude and longitude without me having to do anything. I selected my first target, M27, which appeared at or near the top of potential things to look at. The thing just busied itself for 5 minutes (maybe), and started taking pictures with M27 slap in the centre of the field of view. I was astonished at how well this went. When I had finished with M27 I selected my next target by typing in the NGC number. The goto this time was much quicker,

Picture quality:
With the location and the big Moon I wasn't expecting great things. I was pleasantly surprised. I could witter on a bit more of this, but I won't.

More flexibility:
During this first run I used the simplest way to achieve an astro-image, pretty well all the processing was done inside the SeeStar. only downloading jpg files to my phone. As a minimum it would be useful to download a fts file with floating point values for the pixels it has stacked. This would give more options to 'fix' some of the stuff it has done when generating the jpg. This is possible, I just need to find out how. I also believe it is possible to download fts files for each individual image taken, not sure I'm too bothered about this, but it would be interesting to try at least once.

Overall:
Quite impressed.

October 2025

25th October - Two Comets, some vermin, and a Nebula

You may have recently heard mention of two comets in the evening sky. I got round to imaging them on the gloriously clear (but breezy) night of the 25th.
I was again using the Sony camera with 85mm focal length lens on a fixed tripod.
The first is C/2025 A6 Lemmon, 92.6 million km from the sun, and 94.8 million km from Earth. This is a full resolution crop of a stack of 36 1.6 second exposures:

Not bad, I thought, for a relatively small lens on a fixed tripod. That was the kind of image I expected to end up with, but after the processing I realised that the tail extends far more than I expected. Here's a less cropped image, brightened so that you can see the extent of the tail (which continues beyond the electricity cable I never thought would be in the final image).

From measurements of this image, the length of the tail would be at least 9 million km!

Should you be wondering "why can I see stars behind the electric cable?" :
The image is a stack of 36 1.6 second images on a fixed tripod, this would have taken at least 57.6 seconds. In this time all the stars in the image would be slowly setting, some stars would move behind the cable, some would appear from behind the cable below it. During stacking, each image is aligned on the stars, so it's the cable that appears to move (and get wider in the final image), but you do get to see stars apparently shining through the cable.
I did attempt to split the stacking up to get rid of the cable - but the non-cable area of the image just wasn't as good as this version.

Next up, comet C/2025 R6 SWAN. Not as bright as A6 Lemmon, but closer to Earth at 42.9 million km. R2SWAN was around 159 million km from the sun (compared with Earths 150 million),

Not as impressive as Lemmon, but there is a bit of a tail heading off left.

Vermin
A click to change image of two consecutive pictures taken while I was trying to find comet Lemmon:

The brightest moving thing is a plane. All the rest are Starlink satellites. Vermin.

Later in the evening I was back using the telescope again (at last).
NGC 7380 is an open star cluster and emission nebula about 8500 light years away in the constellation of Cepheus. It's really well placed at this time of year, virtually overhead when I took the frames for this image between 21:45 and 22:52 in the last few hours of BST.

I may have another go at this, and bring out the high contrast filter I gave up with a while ago. Or, more likely, I may quickly get round to realising why I gave up with the high contrast filter.

September 2025

25th September - Kemble's Cascade

Back on the 16th of August I posted a wide angle shot of the area around Perseus and Andromeda and highlighted some interesting objects in it.
One thing I didn't mention was Kemble's Cascade. This is a purely coincidental line of stars of similar magnitude. It looks quite obvious in the wide angle shot, to the left of the "Double Cluster". Here's a better resolution version of the relevant bit of that image, top of my 'out house' is bottom left, Kemble's Cascade, the line of faint stars either side of magnitude 8, is top right.

The line extends over an arc of about 2.5 degrees, so too big an object for my 1000mm focal length 'scope. It would fit into the frame with the 360mm focal length 'scope, but since I was in Lancashire without any 'scopes, I elected to get a closer view with the camera on a fixed tripod, and an 85mm focal length lens (the original wide angle was taken with a 16mm focal length).

The image set was taken later in the evening, and later in the year, than the previous one. Kemble's Cascade is much higher in the sky, and has swung around by about 45 degrees. You'll also notice that the stars in this image are much smaller than those in the wide angle shot, purely a result of the increased resolution. And there are more stars! The overriding reason for this is the increased altitude. Both these things conspire to make the line of stars that is Kemble's Cascade less obvious.
If you click/tap the image above to go to a better resolution version, it's even less obvious (if you are using a phone, it may have decreased the size of the image to be similar to the one here, try expanding it and keep tags on the cascade).
Couple of things about the better resolution version you see on clicking the image above:
1) Looking at the first image from the wide angle shot, one can imagine a hockey stick made up of the line defining Kemble's Cascade with a terminating curve to the left at the end. And the bright star near this is the hockey ball that has just been thwacked.
Moving on to the low-res version of the latest picture, the hockey ball appears to be disintegrating due to the force of the thwack. One can let your imagination run wild here, I imagined myself standing haplessly on a hockey field wearing a Michelin Man style protecto suit of the kind one might don during those difficult conversations with one's spouse/partner. Or you can click on the image to 'big' it and see that the disintegrating hockey ball is in fact an open star cluster.
It has a designation, NGC 1502. It would look a lot nicer in an image taken with the big 'scope, but unless it's the Pleiades (M45) or the Double cluster in Perseus (Caldwell 14) I'm not that keen on open clusters.
The Pleiades has the benefit of some nebulosity; you can see this in an image from Christmas day in the Best of 2018/19 pictures.
Remarkably, the image immediately below that one features another star cluster (but it is principally a picture of the Bubble Nebula).
The Double cluster in Perseus is featured in the Best of 2020 pictures., the final image in the post, taken on 28th January.
The Beehive cluster (M44) is also quite cute, because it features two distinct star colours. It is a very 'open' open cluster, and never made it to any of my "best of" pages. Here's an image from 2013..
In summary, open star clusters - some are nice in binoculars, not great for images. Moving on...
2) On the higher resolution version of the image above you will notice two yellow lines indicating the position of a clump of bluish pixels. This is the planetary nebula NGC 1501. It's another thing (like NGC 1502) I won't be taking a better resolution image of, for a different reason.
Having wittered on a bit about open clusters, I'll continue with a witter regarding planetary nebulae. They are so called because of their resemblance to planets, in the eyepiece or image. They are actually far further away than any visible planet and arise when a low to medium mass star reaches the end of its life as a red giant. It sheds it outer layers, the inner bits collapsing into a white dwarf. This is still a star, but it's not burning fuel in a nuclear reaction - it's just radiating stored heat like embers on a BBQ (well, similar).
A heavier star will not produce a planetary nebula, it will go "supernova", so not leaving a cute shell like outer layer, and what's left of the innards will collapse into a neutron star or, even, a black hole.
Our galaxy is peppered with planetary nebula, most of these are a long way away (NGC 1501 is just shy of 4000 light years), and appear small (NGC 1502 has an apparent size of just 50 arc seconds - not much bigger than Jupiter). It's this apparent size thing that makes me shy away from imaging them - my kit is just not up to tracking them accurately enough at the focal length and exposure time required.
There are of course exceptions. The Dumbbell nebula (M27) is about 8 minutes of arc across, about one quarter the size of the full Moon, and is the only example of a planetary nebula I can definitely say I have seen in a pair of hand-held binoculars. See the image taken on the 6/7th of September in the Best of 2021 pictures for a nice picture of the Dumbbell nebula.
The other notable exception is the Ring nebula in Lyra (M57). With a size of less than 4 arc minutes, this is a far harder binocular object, and something I've struggled to image. See the image from the 10th of June, also in in the Best of 2021 pictures for my best effort on this.
There is just one more planetary nebula that I remember imaging, and only because of its proximity to the galaxy M108 (the Surfboard galaxy). It's the Owl Nebula (M97), just slightly smaller, and slightly fainter than the ring nebula. The picture goes back more than 10 years, taken on the 12/13th of May in the Best of 2014/15 pictures.

7th September - Lunar Eclipse

A 'blood moon' would be rising at around 19:40 in near total eclipse. I had great plans for a sequence of scenic shots from Barleycroft lake, spanning moonrise to the eclipse ending.
Cloud spoilt the show, and I elected not to do the 40 minute walk to my chosen spot. Here's a couple of images from over an hour after moonrise from a bedroom window...

The Earth's shadow has really scooted across the lunar surface in those 10 minutes.
The images were taken with the same lens I envisaged for the scenic shots, and there was still a lot of cloud around at the time. To give you an idea of how much, here are two full frame images, The first exposed to see some background detail, the second, taken immediately after the first, is actually one of the images that went into the 20:55 image above.

August 2025

30th August - Moon

A clear night - too windy for any telescope imaging. I was in Lancs and didn't have a scope anyway. Here's the moon from the bedroom window....

Last 2 weeks of August - cloud

An example of the kind of thing that scuppered my attempts at astro imaging in the back end of the month.

Image taken just before 6am on the 26th August.
"Red sky in the morning..." they say, and it did piss it down that day. For the first proper rain in about three weeks!

17th August - Saturn

A first telescope view for me of Saturn this apparition....

Not as sharp as I had hoped with the newly collimated 'scope. Further work required.
You'll notice we are now looking at the other side of the ring system compared to 2024.
The image, taken with an effective focal length of about 6m, is a stack of 150 frames from a 5000 frame movie.

I also made an attempt to see some of Saturn's satellites....

The names of the moons are in the image. Some details:
Titan: Second largest moon in the Solar System (trumped by Ganymede) with a diameter of 5150 km (larger than Mercury). It orbits Saturn in 16 days. The only moon in the Solar System known to have an atmosphere and liquid on the surface.
Rhea: Saturn's second largest moon with a diameter of 1527 km, orbits Saturn in just 4.5 days.
Dione: Just above the ring system on the right, Dione is the 4th largest of Saturn's moons with a diameter of 1120 km. It orbits in 2.74 days.
Tethys: 5th largest (1066 km) orbits in 1.89 days.

16th August - Perseus and Andromeda

Four days after the peak of the Perseid meteor shower and I thought I would attempt some images.
I took 667 6 second pictures between 22:35 and 23:51, with a wide-angle lens, field of view around 70x50 degrees.
Examining these I found 12 images containing what I thought were definite meteors. Here's 7 of those.
(Each image cycles between the frame with the meteor and the previous frame. I've also included a circle representing the radiant of the Perseid meteor shower).

This is probably not a Perseid, it looks like it's going in the wrong direction.




A plane in this one.


Only the central trace is a meteor, the two others are probably satellites.




The last one is quite cute, it's not a Perseid, but a meteor (or bit of space debris) that has basically just exploded. I've seen this kind of thing once before with the naked eye - just looked like a bright star that persisted for a couple of seconds or so.

Here's a much reduced movie of every tenth frame from the whole 76 minutes. None of the meteors shown above appear in the movie, a huge proportion of the things you see moving are either planes or satellites.

Since the camera was on a fixed tripod the whole sequence of images is not suitable for stacking. So, here's a stack of just the first 51 images. I've marked some "deep sky" objects on the image here.
If you click/tap to go to a bigger image the text goes away.

M31 - the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbour. Naked eye visible on a good night.
M33 - galaxy slightly further away than M31, difficult object in binoculars, and not at all obvious in this image.
M34 - Star Cluster
C14 - the Double Cluster in Perseus, an easier naked eye spot than M31 and worth a look in binoculars.

June/July 2025

22nd July - Moon and Venus.

The Moon and Venus rising over St. Marys Church.
(Click/tap to big the image).

The exposure in the image was set for the church, so the Moon is a tadge on the over-exposed side. Here's a less exposed image showing the Moon phase.

30th June to 4th July - IC 1396 - the Elephant's Trunk Nebula.

Let's get a feel for where we are looking, image courtesy of stellarium...

We are looking North East, between midnight and 1am, towards the constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus, just above the main band of the Milky Way.
The yellow box in the image corresponds to the view in the first picture, taken in the wee small hours of the 30th of June. It's a field of view of around 15x10 degrees, so a moderate wide angle taken with an 85mm focal length lens.
(Click/tap to big the image).

The bright star on the left is Alderamin, the brightest star in Cepheus at magnitude 2.45. The brightish star horizontally central and near the bottom of the image is dimmer at magnitude 3.35, but easily naked eye visible and is the bottom left corner of the house shape which makes Cepheus a recognisable constellation. Near the centre of the image is a deeply orange/red star, often called the Garnet Star (because of its colour). It may well be the reddest star you can see with the naked eye. But you may not be able to see it, it's a variable star with a magnitude range of 3.2 (easily seen) to 5.4 (quality dark sky required). I'm guessing from this image it is around magnitude 4.2, naked eye visible but easily overlooked. It's actually a really bright star, it's around 6000 light years away, compared to the 49 light years of Alderamin. Like the more famous red giant star Betelgeuse in Orion, the Garnet star is approaching the end of its life and will "go supernova" at some point. I think the currently accepted wisdom is that Betelgeuse will be the first.
You can tell from the density of stars that we are looking close to the plane of the Milky Way, and you can see the density increase towards the bottom right corner, as we move closer to that plane. You may also notice streaks of relative darkness, produced by areas of 'muck' drifting around in the region and/or structure in the spiral arms of the galaxy.
The maim target of this image was a near circular area with a diameter of around 3 degrees of arc, with the Garnet star to the bottom left of this, the emission nebula IC 1396, or the Elephant's Trunk Nebula. There isn't very much evidence of this in this image, it's taken with the Sony camera, which isn't particularly sensitive to the emission frequencies.
So on the 3rd and 4th of July, I embarked on 2 nights of observing with the QHY camera attached to the finder 'scope on the big telescope.
Here's a merge of that image with a cropped section of the previous image, Garnet star bottom left. If you click/tap to big this, you go to a full resolution, unadulterated version of the QHY camera image.
(Click/tap to big the image).

Even with a relatively small 207mm focal length, the nebula fills the entirety of the frame (you can see a part of the edge of the nebula top left).
The bright star near the centre of this image is a very bright multiple star system responsible for ionizing the gas in the nebula to produce the red glow. It's about 2400 light years distant.
The image is a total of one hour 45 minutes worth of exposures, spread over the 2 nights. At the same time, I was taking images with the Sony camera attached to the big telescope. To show that the central star is a multi-star system, here it is from the Sony camera, 1000mm focal length. This is processed to bring down the background, and reduce the apparent size of the stars as much as possible.

If you take the processing to the other extreme, there is some nice detail to be seen, despite the lack of red glow. Here's the best example:
(Click/tap to big).

The Nebula is an active star forming region. The two faint(ish) stars in the 'eye' of the globule dangling down from whatever elephant appendage this is are just a few million years old!

I'll leave you the fun of trying to identify where this structure is in the QHY image above!

May 2025

22nd May - NGC 5907 - the Splinter galaxy.

Two disappointing things about the imaging session on the 22nd May.
i) I set out thinking I hadn't imaged this galaxy before - this arises because of duplicate names. I was thinking I was imaging NGC 5906, as per Stellarium version 23.3.0.
So, I was looking for references in my previous images to NGC 5906. Turns out it is more commonly known as NGC 5907, which I imaged and referenced as such on 22nd of April 2020.
Stellarium version 0.13.2 claims there are two objects about 1.25 minutes of arc apart - NGC 5907 it says has an apparent size of 12 arc minutes, 5906 just 0.5 arc minutes. If you search for NGC 5906 in sky-map.org it takes you to something it says is 5907, 11.22 arc seconds across, no mention of 5906.
ii) When I attempted to process the images on the 23rd May, my PC and camera both claimed the SD card needed formatting - there were no image files. I paid 55 pounds to try and get data of this SD card, with some success, all the jpg files were recovered, none of the raw files (the ones I would normally process because of the lossy compression in the jpgs).
Here's a click to change image of 2020 and 2025s efforts:

The 2020 picture is the better one.
NGC 5907 is around 46 million light years away, With an apparent size of 11,6 arc minutes that would equate to a size of 158 thousand light years, considerably bigger than the 100 thousand of our Milky Way.
The galaxy to the right of the image is PGC 54419, it's red-shift distance (there are no other ones) is very close that of the Splinter galaxy, about 37 Mlyr (less than the non-redshift distance).

April 2025

28th April - Messier 101 - the Pinwheel galaxy.

Back on the 1st April I took quite a nice picture of the Little Pinwheel galaxy (NGC 3184). I thought it appropriate to take one of the 'Big Pinwheel'. There are a couple of contenders for this. Messier 33, the second closest galaxy to us, is in the constellation of Triangulum and not visible at the moment. Messier 101, in Ursa Major is very well placed.
(Click/tap to big the image).

The galaxy has an apparent diameter of around 22 arc minutes, less than half the size of M33, but 3 times as big as the Little Pinwheel. It is relatively close at 21 million light years, about half the distance of the Little Pinwheel. This would make it around 135000 light years across, considerably bigger than our own Milky Way.
Other galaxies in the image:
Near the bottom of the picture, NGC 5477. This is a very similar distance 20.7 million light years, so considerably smaller.
Moving right from this to a relatively bright white star, then heading up t 45 degrees by about one third of that distance is a fuzzy looking star. This is PGC 2464645, around 100 Mly away.
There are two galaxies between these and M 101, only one of which I would detect as a 'fuzzy' star.
At the top of the image, and nearly central horizontally, is the second brightest star in the picture, just left and up a bit from this is another 'fuzzy', PGC 49919. This is something like 96 Mly distant.
The brightest star in the image is magnitude 8, and is a mere 412 light years away.
I have imaged this galaxy before, 11 years ago! - check out the Best of 2013/14 images for 28th February 2014.

22nd April - Mist, Hills and the maximum of the April Lyrid meteor shower.

I happened to be in Derbyshire for the peak of the April Lyrid meteor shower. Conditions were less than ideal, as evidenced by this movie (which compresses 44 minutes into 7 and a half seconds):

After taking these images and not seeing a single meteor the whole time I was out there, I thought I would move on to a panoramic view of the horizon.
Two panoramic views in this image, the top one is the one I took in the early hours of the 22nd, the lower one a daylight image (by Colette) from earlier on the 21st.
They were taken from Pindale road, heading East out of Castleton. Starting on the left of the images, looking WNW you can see Mam Tor in the distance. The light illuminating the high cloud above this in the night time image is the glare from Greater Manchester. Moving right, Mam Tor dips down to Hollins Cross, the route we took on the 19th on our walk from Castleton to Edale and back. To the right of this is Barker Bank, then a steep rise up Black Tor, then Lose Hill, before dropping into the valley of the river Noe, where the Sheffield to Manchester railway heads before disappearing into a tunnel behind Mam Tor. The lights below this set of hills are all from a spread-out Castleton. They illuminate the mist which rolled around at varying depths all the time I was there. From my vantage point I stayed above it the whole time. On the other side of the Noe valley the ground rises again to Win Hill, the pike at the top of this is visible in the night panorama, but hidden by a tree in the daylight version. We are looking North East at this point. The lights in the lowland in front of Win Hill are Hope. Great big gobs of mist roll along Noe Valley to the left of these. Looking further East the hills (of similar height to the previously mentioned) get further away, with the glow from Sheffield lighting up the high cloud above it. To finish, the iconic Breedon Hope Cement Works.
If you click/tap the image to big it, you go to a better resolution version of the night panorama.


Back to topic, there were 4 meteors in the 88 images which comprise the movie above...
(Click/tap to big the image).

A and C are definitely not Lyrids, meteor D almost certainly is a 'Lyrid', it points in the direction of the radiant offscreen. Meteor B looks like it's come from a place just below the radiant to me.

8th April - ISS.

All set up and ready to take some images of the ISS passing in front of the Sun:

The big telescope had the x5 magnifier and Sony A6300 camera attached. Here's a composite image of the ISS pass:

The A6300 is taking frames at 100 frames per second, but saving them at about 1/3 of the sensor resolution. The image above is reduced by a further 33%.
I attempted to stack and sharpen just the ISS, with not much in the way of what would normally be called success. I also did the same for the whole image, with thousands of frames taken before the ISS arrived. That brought out the sunspot on the right quite well.
Here's the result of those efforts at the full resolution of the video.

The sunspot on the right is the same one that was on the left side of the Sum on the 29th March during the partial eclipse!

Moving on to the smaller scope, this is 360mm focal length with the Atik GP camera, taking frames at a leisurely 15 fps. The Sun only just fits on the Atik GP sensor with this setup.
If you click/tap to big this image you got to a 300-frame stack of just the Sun, which is ok - if a bit over-sharpened.


Conclusions: Using the x5 magnifier was only ever going to be a success if I actually got the thing in focus - it was a pig. You can compare the image above with this one taken in June 2020 with a plain old 1000mm focal length (which happens to have two ISS transits on the same day!)

4th April - Moon.

A first quarter Moon at this time of year never sets for ages. It's a hinderance to deep sky imaging, so I thought I may as well get some Moon images. I also thought I would try out the Sony camera (nice big sensor size) with the PowerMate x5 magnifier.
Here's the image. You may notice some green and blue circles in it, green is the approximate landing site of Apollo 11, blue of Apollo 16. If you click/tap the image to see a better resolution version, the circles disappear.

The crater with the "multi-peaked" central uplift near the middle of the image is Theophilus. about 110 km across. The similarly sized but more weather(?) beaten crater left and down from this is Cryllius. Both these are in the Mare Nectaris. The Mare making up a big chunk of the top of the image is Mare Tranquillitatis, which anyone of around my age will associate with "Tranquillity base" and Apollo 11. Apollo 16 landed in what appears to be a much rougher area to the left and down from this. To some extent, this is an illusion. If you look at the same area (also marked with a blue dot) in the image below (one of my better moon images, from May 2023, with the area above outlined in red), it looks fairly innocuous:
(Click/tap to big the image).

Sunrise on the Moon is a slow process, here's a cropped version of the first image, the yellow box in the image above. It's an animation spanning 3 and a half hours (from 20:00 to 23:30). The terminator has travelled quite a bit less than the diameter of Theophilus. A quick calculation would suggest it moves at about 10 mph, compared to 1000 for the terminator on the Earth (at the equator).

1st April - The Little Pinwheel Galaxy.

Back to galaxy imaging, and I've gone for one I have imaged before. This is the Little Pinwheel galaxy, or NGC 3184, in Ursa Major.
(Click/tap to big the image).

There is some confusion over the name of this, Stellarium does not recognise NGC 3184, but instead NGC 3180, Sky-map.org will search for 3180, go to exactly the same object, and call it NGC 3184.
The galaxy is about 40 million light years distant, so an apparent diameter of around 6.5 arc minutes would make it about 76 thousand light years across, a tadge smaller than are own galaxy.
Just left of centre at the bottom of the image is another galaxy, NGC 3179. This is about 350 million light years away, and an apparent size of 1.45 arc seconds (from my image) would give it a diameter of 148 thousand light years, it's a big one!
One last galaxy in the image, near the bottom right corner. This is PGC 29990. I could only find red-shift distance measurements for this, and it came in around 36 million light years, so the closest of the lot. This would make it a relative midget at around 9 thousand light years across.
The bright yellow star in the image is magnitude 6.5 and is just shy of 1000 light years away. The next brightest star, a white one, is magnitude 7.3 and a mere 178 light years distant.
I like the colour contrasts here, but not as much as that in my previous image of this object, a wider field of view featuring the third magnitude stars Tania Australis and Tania Borealis. The picture, featured in the best of 2020, is one of my favourite pictures.
(Click/tap to big the image).

(No diffraction spikes - this is taken with a refractor, so doesn't have the secondary mirror supports which produce them.)

If you want to find the Tanias - they're the great bears rear paws, here....

March 2025

29th March - Partial eclipse.

Let's start with the best image, taken at 11:42 with the 1000mm focal length 'scope. This is more than half an hour after maximum eclipse, and the Moon has moved out of the way of a puny grouping of sunspots top centre of the solar disc.
(Click/tap to big the image).

Taking this was a complete change of schedule for me. I had a cunning, if wildly optimistic, plan for more scenic shots, and had headed off down to Barleycroft lake with Colette, tiny Pip Wigan the blind dog, tripod, camera, lenses and filters etc.
As it turned out, the unbroken sunshine suggested by the Met Office and BBC weather apps was about as optimistic as my cunning plan (for which unbroken blue sky was a prerequisite).
Here's some pictures taken at 10:13 (about 5 mins in) and 10:25, which give a flavour of what my cunning plan may have been.

Colette and tiny Pip Wigan the blind dog waited patiently.

I got a snap of some geese in the middle of a yoga class.

Eventually I gave up and we headed home in the hope that the blue sky you can see in the Pip Wigan picture would have drifted over the top of us by the time I had set the big 'scope up.
It did! at least for a while. Here's an animation of pictures from 11:28 to 12:02, the first had no cloud over the sun at all. The cloud cover steadily increased for the remaining pictures.

I put some 50% merges between each image because I thought (at the time) it gave a better impression of the movement of the Moon.

You get an idea of the ambiance of our little expedition in this movie by Colette.

(I would turn the volume up!).

24th March - Mars (and Jupiter).

Back to some planetary imaging with the x5 magnifier (5000 mm focal length). I set up the telescope in daylight, and as part of this took the image of Jupiter at 18:14 (sunset was around 18:20). I've included my first image of Mars (from 19:08) in the same image as a size comparison. Both these at 150% sensor resolution.
The Mars animation show 3 hours of rotation (10 images approximately 20 minutes apart), this is at 200% sensor resolution and brightened up a bit.

We are moving away from Jupiter as the Earth continues its orbit. The apparent size of Jupiter has changed from 39 arc seconds when I last imaged it on the 5th, to less than 37 arc seconds on the 24th.
The same is true for Mars, but more so in terms of the percentage change in distance. When I last imaged it on the 5th of February, it was 106 million km away, 3 weeks after opposition, with an apparent diameter of 13.27 arc seconds. On the 24th of March it was 160 million km away, showing a very noticeable gibbous phase, with an apparent diameter of only 8.74 arc seconds (ignoring the phase).

That may well be it for my planetary imaging until mid-late July, when Saturn is in a decent position in the early morning sky.

20th March - NGC 2841.

My search for new galaxies to image continues. The difference this time is that I chose to use a 2.7x barlow - and hoped for the best. I've done this before for deep sky imaging and been disappointed. Definitely not so this time.
The target is NGC 2841, a galaxy in Ursa Major just shy of 50 million light years away. The image here flicks between a small version of my picture, and a small version of my picture with an overlay of the location of galaxies from sky-map.org (more on this later). If you click/tap the image to big it, you go to a better resolution image without the overlay.

NGC 2841 is a big galaxy, 112000 - 150000 light years across, so bigger than our Milky Way, and possibly bigger than M31, the Andromeda spiral.
There are three more galaxies in the image according to sky-map.org, the most obvious is in the bottom left corner. This is PGC 26572, a galaxy with a red shift derived distance of 380 million light years.
Next most obvious is the flashing ellipse to the right of NGC 2841, PGC 2387030, and then the galaxy just above MGC 2841, PGC 2387317. I couldn't find any information on these in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, other databases are available I believe, but I gave up.
Interestingly (possibly), I had identified these as galaxy candidates before looking at sky-map.org, but also two more which I thought were 'nailed on' galaxies that don't appear on sky-map. I'd also had suspicions regarding another two fuzzy looking stars. You could peruse the big picture to try and spot at least the two I thought were nailed on.

15th March - Venus, and a hard to spot Mercury.

For Fionn - that picture of Venus you helped me take.
(Click/tap to big the image).

Mercury is in the picture too, but you'll have to click tap the image to see a better resolution version (and it's still quite hard to see). Mercury is on the left, about one eighth of the way in and a bit lower than Venus.

2nd/4th/5th/9th March - Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Moon and Sun.

A burst of solar system imaging to start the month. Let's begin with Jupiter and the best image of the bunch:

A nice clear view of the Great Red Spot. I'm rating this as the best image of Jupiter I've achieved in the last 12 years. The moon on the left is Io, and the much fainter moon above Jupiter is Callisto.
This was the first image taken of a sequence lasting an hour and 45 minutes. Unfortunately, the seeing plummeted as Jupiter drifted over houses down the street, so I've cut the number of images here to three, which you can toggle through by clicking the image above.
Io moves over the disc of Jupiter, Callisto drifts east just above the top of the planet.
The images were taken at 19:04, 19:42 and 20:19 on the 5th of March, each is a stack of 300 from 6000 frames taken at around 85 frames per second.

I had been imaging Jupiter the previous evening as well. This suffered from exactly the same seeing issues as on the 5th, but made worse by bits of cloud drifting around.
This time the featured moons are Europa to the left of the planet, and Ganymede. Ganymede is the grey blob in the bottom half of the disk of Jupiter.

Nothing like as crisp as the image from the 5th, this particular image was generated by combining images from 5 separate movie stacks with WinJupos, and it did (this time) produce a marginally better picture for doing so.
The image is centred around 18:40. Seeing conditions varied, but just at the moment Ganymede was about to move away from the disc of Jupiter were good enough for this (reduced size) animation, from 19:37 to 19:59:



My other planetary targets were Venus and Mercury. Lets' start with a couple of pictures featuring both these. The first was taken at 18:32 on the 2nd of March. It also includes a crescent Moon. Venus is right and down a bit from this, and Mercury quite a way below Venus. The second was taken at 19:10 on the 9th. Venus has moved right and much closer to Mercury.
(Click/tap to big the images).

You may have to click/tap the first image to go to a better resolution one to see Mercury. Mercury is an elusive planet, I've probably seen it less than 10 times in the last 50 years (on less than 10 elongations that is, I've seen 3 times already this year). The last time I got an image of it was the end of February 2019. I couldn't resist getting an image with the Moon in the frame. Sadly, the night of 1st March when a thinner Moon was between Venus and Mercury was spoilt by cloud.

On this particular elongation of Mercury, I determined I ought to try and get an image through the telescope, in daylight. I won't dwell on how surprisingly difficult I found this. I had three attempts, none of which could be described as an outstanding success.
Here's two of the three pictures, Mercury on the bottom row, and for comparison four daylight images of Venus taken the dates specified.

You can see the reduction in the crescent and increase in apparent size of Venus as it swings round to pass between the Earth and the Sun. You could make a case that the phase of Mercury has also changed from slightly gibbous to half phase, and that its apparent size has increased - not quite so obvious though.
Let's end with the Moon and Sun.
Two daylight images taken with the Sony camera on the 2nd before I started planetary imaging:
(Click/tap to big these).

And an image taken on the 5th at the increased focal length of my planetary imaging setup:
(Click/tap to big).

February 2025

27th/28th February - Venus, Jupiter, NGC 2903 and NGC 3344, also an update on Mercury

Lets' start with Venus...

Venus is a thinner crescent than back on the 18th, and appears bigger because it's closer to Earth. This is a 'click to change' image, so you can toggle between the images from the 18th and 27th and imagine a giant ball coming winging towards you on a curved path.
(Images are at 150% of the sensor resolution, QHY5II174, 5000 mm focal length).

Moving on to Jupiter, an animation of three images from 19:18, 19:24 and 19:30:

It was excellent observing conditions for Jupiter, no bursts of unsteady air and no high cloud drifting around. The image quality somewhat reflects this. I actually took 16 separate 3000 frame movies in the 12.5 minutes observing time, but had to ditch 3 of these due to technical issues running at around 100 frames/second. For some reason this time the controlling box couldn't cope with the frame rate without the user interface effectively locking up. Since I initially set the camera to take 8 consecutive movies with no gaps this left me unable to nudge the 'scope a bit as Jupiter drifted out of frame. For the second set of 8 I asked the camera software to enforce a gap between movies and dropped the frame rate to around 82 frames/second. The reason behind this change of process was to try out using WinJupos software to de-rotate and then combine images from a number of consecutive movie stacks. I did this using all 13 usable movies, and then generating three images from the first 5, then 4 and 4 movies. None of this produced anything better than the reference frame I was using, so the animation here is just from 3 three movies, stacking 150 frames out of 3000 for each. 5% is quite a high number, it's reflective of how good the seeing was compared to recent outings. I had "time boxed" my planetary imaging because there was no Moon, so some deep sky stuff beckoned...

I'm back to the smaller fainter galaxies. This one is quite cute. It's NGC 2903 in Leo, just East of the sickle shape that is the head of the lion. Like NGC 2404 (image from 1st of February), it's an object you might have thought could have made it into Messiers catalogue.
(Click/tap to big).

We are not in the M81 group now, so this galaxy is over 30 million light years away. You may be able to make out a smudge to the left of it which is the galaxy PGC 27115.
Also, there is a line to the right of NGC 2903 ....

MPC Checker tells me this is in all probability (6386) Keithnol. It also says it is magnitude 16.2, and no observations are needed at this time. It looks dimmer than 16.2 to me, maybe some more observations are needed!

As a follow up to my comments regarding Mercury from the 18th February - I never really expected to see Mercury with the naked eye until the 5th of March, I easily found it in binoculars today (28th February), and having found it, it was an easy naked eye visible object.
My 'good' camera was charging ready for tonights deep sky imaging, so here's a phone camera image as evidence :)

Good news for those scenic pictures with the Moon in shot on the 1st (or maybe 2nd) of March. It will be much higher by the 8th of March.

Here's the image that my 'good' camera was charging up for. It's back to dimmer galaxies with the face on barred spiral NGC 3344. Also in Leo (just above the lions back) this is fainter than NGC 2903, so I've brightened up the back to see the periphery of the galaxy.
(Click/tap to big).

NGC 3344 is around 20 million light years away, and about half the size of the Milky Way. There are quite a few more distant galaxies in the image, whose designations I could look up, but haven't.

22nd February - Galaxies M81, M82 and NGC 3077.

Returning to deep sky objects, I thought I would have a break from some of the fainter stuff, and go back to the Messier catalogue.
While commenting on Caldwell 7 (1st/2nd February) I noted it was a member of the M81 group of galaxies. Here's the galaxy after which the group is named, Messier 81, or Bode's Galaxy.
Two images, one showing quite a wide field of view (about 1.3 degrees), and then a closer in view of M81.
In the wide field, the galaxy bottom left is Messier 82 (the Cigar Galaxy) and bottom right NGC 3077 (the Garland Galaxy).
You can big both images by clicking/tapping.

The wide angle image is a half hearted merge of two image sets. The right side is a stack of 96 pictures and suffered from a burst of neighbourhood light pollution, the left side (with M82) is 196 frames. You can see the merge lines if you big the image. The picture of M81 only is all 292 images stacked (this didn't really work across the whole image).

M81 and M82 are both around 12 million light years distant. The gravitational interaction between them it responsible for excessive star forming activity in M82. M81 is marginally smaller than the Milky Way galaxy.
NGC 3077 is slightly further away than the other two!

18th February - Jupiter and Venus.

With the fast frame rate on the QHY camera now working I got some Jupiter images while varying thickness of cloud drifted around.
Rather than a 'click to change' image or an animation, I thought this time I would just put them all in one single image.
(So you can click/tap this one to big it)

We start out at 18:12 with the moon Io to the West of Jupiter, and heading towards it. An examination of close to the western limb of Jupiter just south of the southern equatorial belt reveals a brightish spot. This is the moon Europa.
By 18:32, Europa has just emerged from in front of the disc of Jupiter, and its shadow has appeared on the east side of the disc. Io moves in towards Jupiter.
There was a bit of shenanigans on the technical front requiring a power off restart which delayed the next image somewhat. Europa and its shadow have moved on, Io was meant to be just disappearing behind the disk, in fact it has all but disappeared. If you look closely at the big picture there is a tiny lump on the right edge of Jupiter that is Io!
The last three images just track the progress of Europa's shadow, and the emergence of the Great Red Spot.

Prior to these images, I had a quick look at Venus. Its crescent is noticeably thinner than back on the 6th.

Venus now starts changing very rapidly, moving quickly towards the sun with an ever-thinning crescent. By the 15th March it will be setting just 1.5 hours after the Sun. By the 21st I would not expect to be able to see it.
Leading up to this, from around the 1st of March, there is a reasonable chance of seeing both Venus and Mercury in the twilight sky. If you've never seen Mercury before this would be a good chance to spot it as Venus will be a guide to where it is.
Here's a click/tap to change set of images showing where Mercury will be over the first 12 days of March.

The Moon is around on the 1st and 2nd, but the best chance of seeing Mercury will be a couple of days either side of the 8th, because it just that bit higher in the twilight.
Images courtesy of Stellarium, you'll notice I've moved the time on by two minutes each day so that the twilight is similar for each image.

14th February - Great Red Spot.

Here's a better picture of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter than the one from the 6th. The moon is Ganymede.

I purchased a 5x PowerMate magnifier in order to use the QHY camera (which has a bigger pixel size than my usual AtikGP camera, so needs more magnification to get the same arc seconds per pixel).
The advantage of the QHY camera is it will run at a faster frame rate, so you get more frames to stack, or in practice the ability to throw away more frames, so only the best get included.
My plan didn't work out for this fleeting session between clouds, because you don't get the superfast frame rate using a USB extender cable. By the time I had worked this out, clouds had brought the imaging to a close.
The image isn't bad though. On the sensor the disc of Jupiter was 175 pixels across, I've zoomed it to 260 pixels for the image here.

1st/2nd/6th February - Galaxy Caldwell 7, and some daylight images of Venus the Moon and Jupiter.

I continued my journey through the lesser galaxies with Caldwell 7, or NGC 2404. When I first saw it in the camera frame, I was surprised that it never made it into Messiers catalogue, just not quite bright enough I guess.
It has a decent apparent diameter too, with a major axis of around 22 arc minutes, or two thirds the diameter of the Moon.
The image has a total exposure time of 3 hours 25 minutes, spread over the evenings of the 1st and 2nd of February.
(Click/tap to big).

It's a close galaxy, about 10 million light years away, and is part of the M81 group of galaxies scattered over a big area around Ursa Major (NGC 2403 is actually in the constellation of Camelopardalis). It's around half the size of the Milky Way.
It is classed as an intermediate spiral. which may mean it's a spiral galaxy with a lot of not exactly spiral stuff going on. See what a mess it is at the bottom of the image. It does have a lot of star forming regions, the bluer blobs in the image above.
There are at least four smaller and more distant galaxies in the image, three are relatively easy(ish) to spot, the fourth less so. I'll allow you the fun of trying to find them :)

Note that I got completely fed up with the streaky noise in my images when trying to bring out the faint bits, so I employed a bit of dithering when taking this. Dithering in this context meaning moving the telescope around a tiny bit every so often, so you effectively randomly position the image on different parts of the sensor. Bit of a faff, but worked a treat I thought.

While I was putting the telescope back on the mount ready for day two's imaging session, I thought I would get some planetary pictures, with my deep sky imaging setup! Also, in the daylight.
(Click/tap to big to a cropped full res version).

Venus and Jupiter are stacks of just 31 single frames, the Moon 15.
I thought the astonishing thing about this was that you can see Ganymede and Io in daylight. I couldn't see Jupiter with the naked eye.

A few days later, on the 6th, I thought I would repeat the image above, but in the dark and with the 'scope bedecked with my planetary imaging kit:
(Click/tap to big).

I took these with an effective focal length of 2.7m, then decided they would stand an increase of 33%, so the big image (if you click/tap the small one here) is equivalent to using a 3.6m focal length.
Looking at it now, I'm not sure that was a good idea, but here's Mars with the same increase applied:

And here's the usual Jupiter animation, 4 hours and 45 minutes of rotation featuring the Great Red Spot:

(To reduce the file size, I've reduced the image to a 2m focal length equivalent. This is still more than one pixel per resolving power of the telescope!)

Venus is now showing a crescent, expect another picture when it's quite a thin crescent.

January 2025

18th January - Oak, Venus, Saturn

There has been oodles of cloud around since the 10th of January. While I was in Lancashire, an hour or so remission from the cloud cover allowed me to take this image of an Oak tree at 20:00 on the 18th.
This follows on from my images of the Moon and Venus on the 3rd. At that time, it was the Moon very close to Venus, heading for a occultation of Saturn. Now the Moon is on the other side of the sky, and Saturn has been moving into the evening twilight. It's now just below and to the left of Venus (just marginally further from Venus than the Moon was on the 3rd).
(Click/tap to big).

It was curiously hazy - such that I was surprised that I could see Saturn at the altitude it was. 30 minutes early it had been fairly obvious, 10 minutes later I couldn't see it.
If you click/tap the image to big it, you can see a few stars of Cetus (left) and Aquarius (right).

9th January - Jupiter

A long observing session, ending into the 10th of January with the temperature at -3C. Also a bit of breeze, which made it feel colder and kept the 'seeing' on the wobbly side.
Here's an overview of the whole thing, starting at 19:18, and ending at 01:10.

The moons are Io, left, and Ganymede, right. You can see the Great Red Spot exiting stage right at the start of the sequence.
The gaps between images are a bit variable. Some long gaps are because the seeing was really poor or because the thing had gone out of focus (while cooling). I thought the resulting images not worth keeping. One gap was because of technical issues involving a computer reset.

There was a period of really stable air. Here's a click to change set of the four best images:

(The image at 22:55 is the best)

2nd/3rd/4th January - The Moon approaches an occultation of Saturn via Venus.

The Moon and Venus were a stunning sight on the early evening of the 3rd January. Here's a couple of wide-angle shots. The first is from the 2nd January, when the Moon was quite a distance from Venus. It's a phone camera image. The second was taken on the 3rd, at about the same time, from around the same place, as the previous image, but with a different (better?) camera.
You can click/tap the images to 'big' them.


The Moon and Venus were too far apart to been seen in the same field of view of the big 'scope, and a combination of freezing temperature and absence of arsedness dissuaded me from setting up the small scope. Instead, two views of the pair using the 80mm lens on the Sony camera:

The first was taken before my walk out for the scenic shot, the second after that walk, in a darker sky. It's exposed to bring out the Earthshine on the dark side of the Moon. Venus is completely over exposed, but bottom right you can see a 4.25 magnitude star in Aquarius, and top left (if you look at the image from the right angle) a 5.3 magnitude star.
The full frame of the second image also features Saturn, here's the full frame - Saturn is top left.
(Click/tap to big).


Around the same time as the pictures above, on the 4th of January the Moon passed in front of the ringed planet Saturn. Definitely a reason to get the big 'scope out. Bluntisham, and huge swathes of the UK, were covered in thick cloud though.

2nd January - Galaxies in Cetus.

The constellation of Cetus (the Whale) is one of three watery constellations (Aquarius and Pisces being the other two) with few really bright stars and little in the way of identifiable shape. I struggle to find my way around this part of the sky.
Cetus is a big constellation. It's brightest star Diphda, magnitude -0.35, can be found by following the line made by the two leftmost stars of the square of Pegasus down by a good number of square lengths and moving left a bit. At my latitude of 52 degrees it won't be very high in the sky (less than 20 degrees).
From here you have to move your head to the left by nearly 45 degrees to get to the second brightest star in the constellation Menkar, magnitude 2.5. Curiously, for reasons I haven't dug into, Menkar is Alpha Ceti and Diphda Beta Ceti. To the right of Menkar is the dimmer but wonderfully named Kaffaljidhma.
The picture here spans and area of sky just south of Kaffaljidhma. The targets are the galaxies M77 and NGC1055.
The image here contains some text which may well be unreadable. If you click the image to big it you go to a better res. picture without the text. If you would like to read the text you can click here.

Top left is NGC 1055, a barred, edge on, spiral with a big dust lane, slightly larger than our own galaxy and around 50 million light years away.
M77 is the face on spiral to the right of the image, slightly smaller than our milky way, and around 34 million light years distant.
The interesting (infuriating!) thing about M77 is what a puny display of outer spiral arms it has. It is a about three times bigger than a cursory glance would suggest.

The text identifies some other interesting objects in the image.
The first is the asteroid Chloe. Orbiting in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter this is by far the smallest (52-55 km), and closest (16 light minutes) thing in the image.
The most distant object is the galaxy right at the bottom of the image at 370 million light years. Personally, I would not trust this number, it's entirely based on red-shift and produces a galaxy size of 170 thousand light years, which is big - but not unimaginable.
The brightest star in the image is magnitude 6.7, so not naked eye visible even in the very best of locations.
The faintest things in the image are around magnitude 18. This is pretty well spot on what I would expect. I did this as a check to see if it was worth another go to bring out the arms of M77 more. Probably the only way I'm going to do this is by stacking thousands of images (rather than 230). People do this sort of thing, and this is probably not a bad target for me to try it out. I'll think about it again next October.

That's the end of the 2025 images.

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