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/