There’s not much opportunity at the moment to capture the planets in the sky with all this cloudy and stormy weather, but just for about an hour each night on the 25th & 26th I managed to take some short AVI movies of Jupiter and Mars between the clouds.

I hope it will clear before Mars comes to opposition on the 8th December

​Images taken with a Meade LX200 GPS 10inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a ZWO ASI 120MC camera with a 3x Barlow lens attached, AVI videos were captured then stacked in RegiSta6 and processed in PS CS4 ☺

Just after midnight, I went outside here at home to check on Mars and there it was shining brilliantly like a beautiful red ruby in the night sky.
 
The planet was making a lovely celestial triangle with the red coloured stars Aldebaran in Taurus and Betelgeuse in Orion.
 
Images taken with just a Canon 70D camera and a Tokina 11-16mm F2.8 lens on a camera tripod; exposure time was 10 seconds and ISO1600. Five images captured and stacked in DSS and processed in PS CS4.

​~ Totality was from 8.16pm to 9.42pm ~
 
I’ve made up a photomontage of the lunar images that I took of the Total Eclipse of Moon on the evening of the 8th November 2022.
 
It was very cloudy to begin with so missed some of the beginning, the first image taken was when the Moon went into the Umbral at 7.11pm, this had to be a very quick shot as cloud came over the sky a few minutes after.
 
The next time it had cleared, was half way through the eclipse at 7.46pm. It looked like we were not going to see totality but by magic the sky started to clear and there was the eclipsed Moon in all its glory among the faint stars of Aries (The Ram).
 
It looked ever so pretty and the colour was just gorgeous, because I only had my camera and lens on a tripod I could only take a couple of shots at a time as the movement of the heavens is quite noticeable at high magnification.
 
I used a Canon 70D camera and Tamron 18-400mm lens with a 2x teleconverter making a focal length of 1280mm. Because the eclipse was quite bright I only had to use a 1 second exposure with ISO 2000 to capture a pretty picture.
 
Please see below the single image with all the setting times that I used, it was so lucky that the sky cleared in time to see this beautiful wonder of the night sky :-)

1st image taken at 7.11pm (AEST) Umbral Eclipse has begun.
​Five images captured with exposure time of 1/250th second and ISO 160, stacked in RegiStax6.

2nd Image taken midway into eclipse at 7.46pm with exposure time of 1/250th second and ISO 200.
Five images captured and stacked in RegiStax6.

3rd Image taken at Totality at 9.06pm with planet Uranus only 1.5 degrees away, exposure time of 1 second and ISO 2000, five images were captured and stacked in RegiStax6, processed in PS CS4.

4th images taken at 10pm with the Moon moving out of the Earths shadow and sunlight returning on NW limb at 10pm with exposure time of 2 seconds and ISO 500.
​You can still see the gorgeous orange red colour on the surface with this longer exposure.

 5th Image was taken at 10.07 pm that showed a lot of the Moon still in the Earths shadow, with exposure time of 1/30th second and ISO 400.
 
At 10.10pm cloud came over the whole sky and that was the end of seeing more of the Eclipse
​that ended at 11.58pm.

~ Lunar Eclipse with Uranus on the ecliptic ~

​​We had very cloudy skies right up to the time of totality and then the sky cleared for a stunning view of the Total Eclipse of the Moon; this was a particularly pretty eclipse because of the field of stars surrounding the deep red Moon with the bluish planet Uranus only 1.5 degrees away.
 
Images were taken with just a Canon 70D camera and Tamron18-400mm lens and 2x teleconverter, making a focal length of 1280mm on a static camera tripod.

Five images were captured with 1-second exposures, ISO 2000 and stacked in Registax6 processed in PS.

The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas in the constellation of Cygnus (The Swan). The beautiful structure of entwined gas and dust are the remnants from an exploding star that occurred approximately 8000 -10,000 years ago in massive supernova!
 
“It is believed that this star was 20 times more massive than our Sun, since that time it has expanded to cover an area of the sky roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, and 36 times the area, of the full moon)” (Referenced from planetarium app Stellarium).
 
This large nebula is very tenuous in nature and has a very low surface area so you really need quite a dark sky to capture it. At my Stardust Observatory at Leyburn it does not get very high in the northern sky only about 30 degrees. It’s also only seen for a few months from August to October so it’s not an easy object to capture.
 
I’ve taken a closer look at the Veil Nebula with its many parts, the Eastern Veil also know as NGC 6992 or Caldwell 34 and NGC 6995 is quite colourful with very intricate structures.  The Western Veil is known as NGC 6960 or the Witch’s broom, has this pretty bright star embedded into it only known as 52 Cygni.
 
There is another interesting feature called Pickering’s Triangle that I’ve also managed to capture in the middle of the nebula.
 
To capture this image I used a Canon 6D Mark 11 camera with a 70-200mm lens attached to a tracking telescope in the observatory. I wanted to capture a wider field of this area and really liked having that large open star cluster NGC 6940 in the constellation of Vulpecula in the filed of view.

​ I’ve also cropped in to concentrate of the large faint nebula itself with the Eastern and Western sections included.
 
There were 20 x 3 minutes images with corresponding dark frames captured, with ISO 3200.
​Images were stacked in DSS and processed in Photoshop.

The Hubble Space Telescope has recently taken another look at this amazing nebula, please go to: 
​Hubble Revisits the Veil Nebula - Apr 2, 2021 -
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2021/hubble-revisits-the-veil-nebula
 
Hubble’s Caldwell Catalog – Caldwell 34 – Dec 18, 2019 -
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/caldwell-34
 
~ The International Astronomical Unions Constellations (IAU) star charts at:
https://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations/

After nearly a month of gloomy wet weather we finally got a nice hot sunny day, but then the storm clouds built up that resulted in a large band of thunderstorms with very heavy rain and hail :-o 
 
When it was all over, I looked outside and saw this amazing Cumulonimbus cloud with so much incredible structure! As the sun was setting in the west it lit the whole cloud up into a fiery orange/red colour, after sunset you could still see the lightning firing away between the folds, it was just awesome :-D

Because of all the wet and gloomy weather, I’ve revisited the images of the planets that I posted on Spaceweather to make up a photo montage to show how big Jupiter was at opposition as compared to Saturn and Mars.
 
When I inserted Mars into the picture, I was so amazed to see that the light and dark features on the surface of Mars looked just like a face of an old wise man…can you see it too!
 
Many great astronomers including William Herschel have been tricked by seeing strange things on the Martian surface…I can see why now!
 
This phenomena is called Pareidolia, and Mars is one of those places known for it to happen please see the link at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
 
All images were taken with a Meade LX200 GPS 10inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a ZWO ASI 120MC camera with 3x Barlow lens attached. (Planets to scale in size not distance)
 

I was lucky again the following night to get a few minutes of steady seeing to capture some videos of Mars and was very surprised to see so much detail on the surface.  You can clearly see the large plain of Syrtis Major in the images even though the planet is still a long way away from Earth.
 
Mars will be at opposition on the 8th December so it will grow in size over the next couple of months, as it gets closer to Earth.
 
My images were taken at ‘My Stardust Observatory’ with a Meade LX200 GPS 10inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a ZWO ASI 120MC camera with a 3x Barlow lens attached. AVI videos were captured and stacked in RegiSta6 and processed in PS CS4.

 (Please see my telescope setup below)

I was out at My Stardust Observatory for the new Moon long weekend and was lucky enough to get about an hour and half of clear steady sky to take some pictures of Saturn and Jupiter in the observatory.
​
Here in Australia, Saturn is now high up in the sky where you can sometimes get some really good seeing.

After taking a couple of AVI video’s I was delighted to see that I’d captured the darker North Polar Cap and also some of the subtle North Temperate and Equatorial Zones and Belts with the North and South Equatorial Belts being very prominent. The rings are just so beautiful with the Cassini division clearly defined; you can also see the dark shadow of the ring on the planet.

Another very interesting feature is the colour of the South Polar Cap that had a soft bluish/aqua hue; this shows up on all the AVI movie files and looks quite lovely.
 
My images were taken with a Meade LX200 GPS 10inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a ZWO ASI 120MC camera with a 3x Barlow lens attached. AVI videos were captured with 3000 frames and stacked in RegiSta6 and processed in PS CS4.

I was out at My Stardust Observatory and was lucky enough to get some clear steady sky to take pictures of Jupiter and Saturn in the observatory.
 
Jupiter was very bright in the night sky when it was just two days away from opposition in this photo. This opposition of Jupiter is one of its closest approaches to Earth since 1963, at only 590.6 million kilometres, this is why the planet looks so much brighter in the sky!
 
I’m hoping to get some more images of Jupiter over the coming week before our Earth races away from the planet. (Earth has a faster orbit around the Sun than Jupiter because we are closer to our Star)
 
There’s so much detail to see on the planet with all the different Belts and Zones on show, there are many White and Red Ovals that can be seen along with some lovely blue coloured Festoons in the turbulent atmosphere in the North Equatorial Belt and Zones. The Great Red Spot is nearing the western limb and rotating out of view.
 
~ Jupiter with its approaching moon Io on the 25th September 2022 ~

In the second image, Jupiter’s smallest moon Io is approaching the planet.
 
My images were taken with a Meade LX200 GPS 10inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a ZWO ASI 120MC camera with a 3x Barlow lens attached.
​AVI videos were captured and stacked in RegiSta6 and processed in PS CS4.