Mikes astronomy images 2026

January 2026

28th January - Moon, Sun and Jupiter.

Let's start with the Moon, and an image taken at 16:15, still daylight but the sky darkening towards the East where the moon was well risen.

(Image courtesy of Colette).
I was using the QHY camera I use for planetary imaging, but this time with no barlow lens, so just the 1000 mm focal length. The Moon doesn't quite fit in the frame.
(Click/tap to big the image)

Somehow, I managed to create an image that was a bit too over-sharpened, and a bit too contrasty for my liking, but it did bring my attention to a feature I have not noticed before. The oval sea at the right of the image is the Mare Crisium. Just to the left of this is the small bright ray crater Proclus. I say small, it's 27km across so a decent hike. To the left of this there appears to be a fan like area of darkness. I thought 'that's odd', and checked out another image to see if it was there, indeed it was. It's not a fan like area of darkness, it's the absence of rays from the crater. I did a very small amount of googling, and found this comment in the Sky at Nights' guide to the Moon:
"It is clear that the Proclus rays were formed in a different manner from those of the major systems such as Tycho crater."
Didn't exactly sate my curiosity, but there you go.
If you want to see the comparison image it's here.(from the Best of 2023 images). It's worth a look, it also makes me think I should go back to stacking lunar and solar images in Registax6, and not AutoStakkert".

Moving on to Jupiter, there was very little wind so I was expecting a decent set of images. It turned out not so, here's an animation of 11 pictures starting at 18:18 and ending at 20:48. For the first few pictures the quality is so poor you can hardly see the rotation. (See if you can see the Great Red Spot disappearing off right in the first couple of frames).

It perked up a lot for the last two, here they are in the click to change image.


Any optimism I had at this point was swiftly eliminated by cloud.

I'll finish with the Sun, the fist object I imaged.
(Click/tap to big the image)

Note a huge amount of sunspot activity, but some nice faculae (white bits) near the edges.
As with the Moon, the whole of the Sun does not fit in the frame of the QHY camera, so this is merge of two images.

23rd/24th January - Dreyer's Nebula (IC 2169) and the 5907 project continues.

The blue area of the picture is a reflection nebula in the constellation of Monoceros (the Unicorn). This has the designation IC 447. The dark area inside the blue (just north of centre) is Dreyer's nebula IC 2169. You can see that this dark area extends in an arc heading north from IC 447, widening as it heads upwards and then left. It terminates in a bulbous bit of blackness near the top of the image. Just above this, and only partially visible in the picture, is another reflection nebula, IC 446. Had I noticed this when the first few images had come in, I would have redirected the camera to include it. All this stuff is about 2500 light years away.
(Click/tap to big the image)

Monoceros is just east of Orion, the Milky Way trundles through it, hence the rich star field in the image. The constellation contains a number of other interesting objects, the Xmas tree cluster featured last Christmas day is not far from IC 2169.
The image above was taken with the SeeStar S50 in equatorial mode, 169 20 second exposures, stacked by the SeeStar and AI-denoised by the SeeStar.

I finished imagining IC 2169 just before midnight on the 23rd, maybe a bit prematurely - but having purchased n equatorial wedge, I wanted to return to the 5907 project (see 12th/13th/14th January).
Getting an accurate polar alignment with the wedge adjustments was as tricky as I had expected. At the start of the IC 2169 imaging, I had tried 30 second exposures. The reject rate on frames was enormous, so I backed off to 20 seconds. This had a perfectly acceptable reject rate. 20 seconds is a lot better than 10, so I saw no reason to change this, if I'm going to get 50 hours' worth of exposures I don't want to be spending half an hour or more each time trying to get 'perfect' alignment. I had to limit the imaging this session to one hour, because the battery on the SeeStar was close to empty. So, in total I now have 4 hours and 20 minutes' worth of imaages. Here's the combination of all those:
(Click/tap to big the image)

This is certainly an improvement on the 3hr 20min version, but still not as good as the one you can see in the best of 2020 images (22nd/23rd April).
I've put some labels on the image of other galaxies:
NGC 5907, our main target, is somewhere around 36 million light years away.
PGC 54577, 43 Mly.
PGC 54419, 42 Mly.
The next really surprised me, PGC 2538922 is supposedly 1018 Mly distant (source NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database). This is more than twice the distance of anything else I have imaged and looked up the distance for! OK, in this image it looks like a star, but you can find it in the 2020 picture and it does have a bit of galactic like haze around it. There are at least 3 more galaxies in the picture (identified using sky-map.org) which I didn't put labels on (because they're barely visible). The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database didn't have entries for PGC 2539655, PGC 2541633 or PGC 2523331, so I can't quote any distances. The last one was a bit disappointing, in both the picture here and the 2020 image it looks more galactic than PGC 2538922.
I would take that 1 billion light years away figure with a pinch of salt (as I would most galaxy distances, you may have noticed that back in 2020 I quoted the distance to NGC 5907 as 50 Mly, not 36 Mly (don't know where I got that number from now).

20th/21st January - No Aurora here.

The night of the 19th/20th had seen a spell of bright aurora, with some photos from locations quite near me on the BBC news website. I had missed it completely - it was cloudy when I went to bed.
The forecast for the night of the 20th/21st for aurora also looked good, the cloud forecast rather less so.
Here's how the aurora panned out...

with peaks 14:00 to 15:00 and 23:00 to midnight on the 20th.
It was almost cloudless at 16:00, but still daylight. By the time it had got dark, the cloud had increased dramatically. Here's a picture from 19:20, which was going to be my best chance of seeing anything before the rain arrived.

No Aurora there.
The rain duly arrived, and it was quite heavy when I went to bed at 23:00. I woke at 6, looked out the window to almost cloudless skies, checked the Aurora Watch UK website, and legged it downstairs.
Nothing....

This does, however, give me the chance to put some constellations labels on the sky looking NNE at ten past six on a late January morning. Click the image above to see the labels.

12th/13th/14th January - The 5907 project.

Here's an object I have imaged before, the galaxy NGC 5907 in the constellation of Draco about 46 million light years away.
(Click/tap to big the image)

This is taken with the SeeStar S50, 1171 10 second exposures totalling 3 hours 15 minutes, spread over two nights - from 23:00 on the 12th to 01:14 on the 13th, and then 02:14 to 04:23 on the 14th.
The two sessions were stacked separately in Deep Sky Stacker, and the two resulting images 'stacked' then post-processed in Astro Art 6.
Note that I didn't use the live stack images generated by the SeeStar, instead saving each single image as a fits file, then stacking these on my PC (see below for why).
The image compares rather unfavourably to the one I took with the Sony camera and 1000mm focal length 'scope on the 22nd April 2020., but strikes me as being OK for the focal length of the SeeStar.

Why am I re-imaging this object on a device which I expected to produce a poorer image than that from 2020?
Because this was meant to be the start of a project to obtain something like 50 hours' worth of exposure. I thought I would stand far more chance of achieving this if I used the SeeStar (with minimal setup time) than the big scope. The goal is to see the faint star streams that circle the galaxy, so I'm not overly concerned by the finer detail for this project. (See this for an excellent image of the streams).

The project I initially hoped I would get away with is being abandoned at this point. Here's a description of the difficulties I had processing the images:
First a note as to why I was I wanted to process each individual image. This is simply because the stacked image that the SeeStar generates is 16 bit. This is absolutely fine and dandy for a final image, but in the scenario where I was going to use multiple sub-stacks to generate the final image, I wanted as much data as possible in each, basically I wanted each sub-stack saved as a 32 bit floating point file.
Issues with the stacking:
Because each individual image uses just a small part of the possible intensity range, Deep Sky Stacker struggled to identify enough stars to align with. For the first run there were 599 images, DSS only used 570, for the second batch it did manage to use all 601 images. I tried with all 1200 images, it decided it was only going to stack 670 of them!
Astro Art 6 happily stacked all 599 in the first batch and all 601 in the second, but when trying to stack all 1200 gave up about halfway through. It doesn't actually give up, it puts up a dialog saying it failed to process the image with the options of skipping and continuing, or just giving up. After pressing SKIP multiple times in succession, it was me that gave up.
This would all be fine, if I could combine the stacked images from each run. Deep Sky Stacker failed to combine the two sub-stacks it had generated, and the two sub-stacks generated by AA6. AA6 failed to combine the two sub-stacks it had generated, but did combine the two DSS stacks!
The picture above is the two DSS sub-stacks combined and post processed in AA6. But the issues with generating this don't bode well for the 50-hour project.
One possible reason for the issues during stacking is the amount of image rotation which occurs as a result of using the AltAz mount that comes with the SeeStar. You can see just how much in this image of the first and last single images taken.

There are two issues that this amount of rotation might produce. One is that stars that have been chosen as references by the stacking software may well disappear off image (I attempted to make the reference frame for both DSS and AA6 somewhere in the middle of the image sequence to alleviate this somewhat). The second is that a single image is unlikely to be truly flat, regions near the edge of image will have less arc seconds per pixel than a region near the centre. Stars that move from one part of the image to another may well just not align. I have no control over what stars either DSS or AA6 chooses for alignment, what weight it puts on them or at what stage it considers an alignment to have failed.
Possible solutions are:
1) Write my own stacking software. Quite exciting, but probably exceedingly time consuming.
2) Spend money on other stacking software.
3) Spend money on a 'wedge' so that I can use the SeeStar in equatorial mode.
3) is by far the best option. The SeeStar then only uses a single axis to track the object as it moves across the sky, and the rotation is non-existent (if that axis is truly parallel to the axis of rotation of the Earth). Because of the absence of rotation, it suddenly becomes possible to increase the exposure time from 10 to 30 seconds or more, alleviating the problem DSS had with star detection.
The downside is that the axis of rotation needs aligning to the Earth's axis. SeeStar includes a tool to help with this, but it will significantly increase the setup time for the SeeStar. It's still going to be less than the setup time for the big 'scope though (I hope).

A couple of other things learned from this imaging.
In the comparison image above, it's obvious that the first image taken at 23:00 is far poorer quality than that at 4:23. This is down to the altitude on the object, in the first it was a mere 25.5 degrees, in the final image it was 61.5 degrees. I've taken plenty of successful images of deep sky objects with altitudes of 25.5 degrees of less, but in the context of trying to image the star streams around the galaxy I don't think that first hour of imaging would have contributed much.
I tried SeeStar's AI denoise on the first set of images. To my mind it made a right pig's ear of it, completely obliterating any detail in the galaxy itself, and almost obliterating the tiny galaxy PGC 54419 near the top of the image.

3rd/4th January - Full Moon.

There were some really clear nights at the beginning of January. As a consequence, they were really cold too. Also, I had a cold, so didn't do much astronomy.
I did however take some 'camera on a fixed tripod and 85mm lens' images of the Full Moon, well it was full when it was setting on the morning of the 3rd.
Here they are:

These are all heavily cropped, 400x400 pixels from a 6000x4000 original.
Some details:

3/1/26 8:08
No Exposures: 1
Exposure time: 1/800 sec
F-stop: f/7.1
ISO speed: 640
Moon Altitude: 3.5 degrees
Illuminated: 99.9%

3/1/26 20:41
No Exposures: 46
Exposure time: 1/4000 sec
F-stop: f/7.1
ISO speed: 640
Moon Altitude: 39 degrees
Illuminated: 99.6%

4/1/26 8:02
No Exposures: 18
Exposure time: 1/250 sec
F-stop: f/7.1
ISO speed: 640
Moon Altitude: 9.5 degrees
Illuminated: 98.8%

You can see from the numbers above that I rather over did the exposure for the last image. The middle image is not at all bad given the focal length of the lens.
Also, for that central image, Jupiter was in the frame. I wasn't really visible in the set of images at 1/4000 sec exposure. I upped the exposure to 1/250 sec, and took another 25 pictures, hoping to see not just Jupiter but some other stars as well. When I did the stacking, the moon was a completely white disc, Jupiter very evident, but I couldn't see a single other star. Experience should have told me that I ought to have used a longer exposure than I did. No matter, here is a reduced version of a merge of the Moon exposed stack and the Jupiter exposed stack:


An interesting event occurred during the last four images from the morning of the 4th of January:

That's the end of the 2026 images, for now.

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

The best pictures from 2025.

The best pictures from 2024.

The best pictures from 2023.

The best pictures from 2022.

The best pictures from 2021.

The best pictures from 2020.

The best pictures from 2018/2019.

The best pictures from 2016/2017.

The best pictures from 2015/2016.

The best pictures from 2014/2015.

The best pictures from 2013/2014.

The best pictures from 2012/2013.