Astronomical Images - the best from 2025
Featuring:
Clicking on some images won't do anything, and on others might toggle you through an image sequence.
There were an abundance of nebula images in 2025, let's start with the best:
13th December - Horse Head Nebula and friends.
A surprisingly good image of the Horse Head Nebula (IC 434, or B 33 in the Bernard catalogue of dark nebula). 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).
Next up, a delicate detail from what was a big wodge of images featuring the Elephants trunk nebula.
30th June to 4th July - IC 1396 - the Elephant's Trunk Nebula
(Click/tap to big the image).
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!
We move seamlessly from Elephants trunk to Monkey head.
20th November - The Monkey Head Nebula (NGC 2174)
On the 17th of November 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 an 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 include the next one largely because it was taken on Christmas day, which always counts for extra points, for the same reason I've included a bonus asterism picture.
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".
22nd February - Galaxies M81, M82 and NGC 3077
I had a break from some of the fainter galaxies I was imaging in 2024, and went back to the Messier catalogue.
This is the galaxy after which the M81 group of galaxies is named, M 81.
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 below, the galaxy bottom left is Messier 82 (the Cigar Galaxy) and bottom right NGC 3077 (the Garland Galaxy).
If you click/tap on this you go to the zoomed in picture of just M 81.
The wide angle image is a 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. 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.
1st April - The Little Pinwheel Galaxy
Back a galaxy 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.
You can see it here. (No diffraction spikes - this is taken with a refractor, so doesn't have the secondary mirror supports which produce them.)
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. If you click/tap the image to big it, you go to a better resolution image.
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 to the right of NGC 2841, PGC 2387030, and then the galaxy just above MGC 2841, PGC 2387317 (which doesn't look a lot different to a blueish star). 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.
No Aurora pictures from 2025, and only one comet worthy of this page:
25th October - Comet C/2025 R6 SWAN
You may have 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 (and only one here) is C/2025 A6 Lemmon, 92.6 million km from the sun, and 94.8 million km from Earth. I've brightened the image 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 after cropping).
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.
I put quite a lot of meteor pictures in the blog in 2025, during the Lyrid meteor shower in April, the Perseids in August, and the Geminids in December. Here's two:
13th December - a Geminid.
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.
16th August - Perseid meteor shower
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 the most 'spectacular' one.
(The image cycles between the frame with the meteor and the previous frame).
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.
There were two. Both were spoilt by cloud, so I only got to see the back end of each.
29th March - Partial Solar 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).
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.
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.
These have already featured in the eclipses section, here's couple of closer in shots.
8th April - ISS
Here's a composite image of the ISS pass, taken with the 1000mm focal length telescope with x5 magnifier and Sony A6300 camera attached :
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!
A section of the Moon taken on the 5th March at the 5000 mm focal length of my planetary imaging setup:
(Click/tap to big).
Let's begin with Jupiter taken on the 5th of March:
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.
The best image of Saturn was the first one I took, when the rings were a bit wider than my efforts later in the year. 17th August - Saturn
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 only took two images of Mars, I've rescaled the first one here to be the same magnification as the second - you can see the change in size.
The first image was taken with the ATIK GP camera using a 2700mm focal length on the 5th of February. The second the QHY camera and 5000mm focal length on the 24th of March. Because of the difference in pixel size between the two cameras these produce very very similarly sized images.
The Mars animation shows 3 hours of rotation (10 images approximately 20 minutes apart)..
Both images are around 200% sensor resolution.
The percentage change in distance to Mars between the two dates is big. 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).
Daylight images of Venus and Mercury from February and March:
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.
I would normally only include one scenic image here. I couldn't decide, so here are two.
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.
22nd April - Castleton in Derbyshire
Taken from Pindale road, heading East out of Castleton. Starting on the left of the image, looking WNW you can see Mam Tor in the distance. The light illuminating the high cloud above this 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. If you look at the big version of the image the bright star above the start of the descent from Lose Hill into the valley is Capella, the stars of the constellation Perseus are to the right, above the foreground tree. On the other side of the Noe valley the ground rises again to Win Hill, with its pike at the top. We are looking North East at this point. Above the start of the climb up Win Hill, near the top of the image is the constellation of Cassiopeia. 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. The group of stars above this (the diamond shape with a tail) is the easily recognizable, but small constellation of Delphinus.
(click/tap the image to big the image)
IC 434 (Horse Head), NGC 2024 (Flame), NGC 2023, IC 1396 (Elephants trunk) NGC 2174 (Monkey head) and 2264 (Christmas tree) nebulae.
M81, M82, NGC 2077, NGC 3184 and NGC 2841 galaxies.
1 comet, C/2025 R6 SWAN.
2 Meteors.
2 Eclipses.
Sun, Moon, ISS, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus and Mercury.
St. Mary's Church, and the Peak District
Clicking on some images won't do anything, and on others might toggle you through an image sequence.
Nebulae
There were an abundance of nebula images in 2025, let's start with the best:
13th December - Horse Head Nebula and friends.
A surprisingly good image of the Horse Head Nebula (IC 434, or B 33 in the Bernard catalogue of dark nebula). 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).
Next up, a delicate detail from what was a big wodge of images featuring the Elephants trunk nebula.
30th June to 4th July - IC 1396 - the Elephant's Trunk Nebula
(Click/tap to big the image).
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!
We move seamlessly from Elephants trunk to Monkey head.
20th November - The Monkey Head Nebula (NGC 2174)
On the 17th of November 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 an 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 include the next one largely because it was taken on Christmas day, which always counts for extra points, for the same reason I've included a bonus asterism picture.
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".
Galaxies
Let's look at the best three of 12 galaxy images from 2025:22nd February - Galaxies M81, M82 and NGC 3077
I had a break from some of the fainter galaxies I was imaging in 2024, and went back to the Messier catalogue.
This is the galaxy after which the M81 group of galaxies is named, M 81.
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 below, the galaxy bottom left is Messier 82 (the Cigar Galaxy) and bottom right NGC 3077 (the Garland Galaxy).
If you click/tap on this you go to the zoomed in picture of just M 81.
The wide angle image is a 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. 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.
1st April - The Little Pinwheel Galaxy
Back a galaxy 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.
You can see it here. (No diffraction spikes - this is taken with a refractor, so doesn't have the secondary mirror supports which produce them.)
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. If you click/tap the image to big it, you go to a better resolution image.
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 to the right of NGC 2841, PGC 2387030, and then the galaxy just above MGC 2841, PGC 2387317 (which doesn't look a lot different to a blueish star). 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.
Comets
No Aurora pictures from 2025, and only one comet worthy of this page:
25th October - Comet C/2025 R6 SWAN
You may have 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 (and only one here) is C/2025 A6 Lemmon, 92.6 million km from the sun, and 94.8 million km from Earth. I've brightened the image 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 after cropping).
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.
Meteors
I put quite a lot of meteor pictures in the blog in 2025, during the Lyrid meteor shower in April, the Perseids in August, and the Geminids in December. Here's two:
13th December - a Geminid.
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.
16th August - Perseid meteor shower
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 the most 'spectacular' one.
(The image cycles between the frame with the meteor and the previous frame).
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.
Eclipses
There were two. Both were spoilt by cloud, so I only got to see the back end of each.
29th March - Partial Solar 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).
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.
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 Sun and Moon
These have already featured in the eclipses section, here's couple of closer in shots.
8th April - ISS
Here's a composite image of the ISS pass, taken with the 1000mm focal length telescope with x5 magnifier and Sony A6300 camera attached :
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!
A section of the Moon taken on the 5th March at the 5000 mm focal length of my planetary imaging setup:
(Click/tap to big).
The Planets
Let's begin with Jupiter taken on the 5th of March:
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.
The best image of Saturn was the first one I took, when the rings were a bit wider than my efforts later in the year. 17th August - Saturn
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 only took two images of Mars, I've rescaled the first one here to be the same magnification as the second - you can see the change in size.
The first image was taken with the ATIK GP camera using a 2700mm focal length on the 5th of February. The second the QHY camera and 5000mm focal length on the 24th of March. Because of the difference in pixel size between the two cameras these produce very very similarly sized images.
The Mars animation shows 3 hours of rotation (10 images approximately 20 minutes apart)..
Both images are around 200% sensor resolution.
The percentage change in distance to Mars between the two dates is big. 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).
Daylight images of Venus and Mercury from February and March:
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.
Scenic
I would normally only include one scenic image here. I couldn't decide, so here are two.
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.
22nd April - Castleton in Derbyshire
Taken from Pindale road, heading East out of Castleton. Starting on the left of the image, looking WNW you can see Mam Tor in the distance. The light illuminating the high cloud above this 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. If you look at the big version of the image the bright star above the start of the descent from Lose Hill into the valley is Capella, the stars of the constellation Perseus are to the right, above the foreground tree. On the other side of the Noe valley the ground rises again to Win Hill, with its pike at the top. We are looking North East at this point. Above the start of the climb up Win Hill, near the top of the image is the constellation of Cassiopeia. 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. The group of stars above this (the diamond shape with a tail) is the easily recognizable, but small constellation of Delphinus.
(click/tap the image to big the image)
Comments
Post a Comment