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...
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 ...
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