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 realis...