There was a lot of high level cloud in the western sky late this afternoon when I took these images, I was so surprised to capture this much detail on the surface of the Sun.
 
There were many long filaments and the new sunspots AR 3214 & AR 3213 looked very active, there was also a nice prominence on the western limb.
 
Images taken with a Lunt (PT) 60mm solar telescope and a Canon 700D camera with a 2x Barlow lens attached. Twenty images were capture with an exposure of 1/200th second and ISO200.

​Images were stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS. Monochrome images, exposure time was 1/125th second and ISO800 with the same processing.

I only just managed to capture these images of the Sun before the clouds started rolling in showing those two large sunspot areas AR3190 & 3192.

​You can see a lot of activity surrounding them as they both neared the western limb of the Sun; there are also a lot of little sunspots sprinkling right across the northern solar surface.
 
The (Ha) images were taken with a Lunt 60mm solar telescope with a Canon 700D fitted with a 2x Barlow lens, exposure time was 1/320th second and ISO200.

Twenty images captures and stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4.
 
The white light image was taken with a Canon 70D camera and Canon 100-400mm lens with 2x teleconverter making a focal length of 1280mm, a glass solar filter was fitted to lens for safe viewing and imaging.

Not only is that large sunspot AR 3190 moving toward the centre of the Sun many other sunspots have developed on the solar surface. It’s the most I’ve seen in a very long time :-)
 
I get this information from the Spaceweather.com website where the daily Sun is posted from NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory at: https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov
It helps me to orientate my solar images and to name them their numbers on the image.
 
Images taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Canon 100-400mm lens with a 2x teleconverter attached making a focal length of 1280mm.  An Orion glass solar filter was fitted to the lens for safe imaging and viewing of the Sun.

Twenty images were captured with 1/500th second exposures and ISO100, ​pictures were stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4.

Sunspot AR 3190 is the largest individual sunspot of Solar Cycle 25 and is now four to five times the size of the diameter of our Earth and it’s crackling with M-class and X-class solar flares!
 
What does it take to be X-class at: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10833
 
Images taken with a Canon 70D camera and a Canon 100-400mm lens with a 2x teleconverter attached making a focal length of 1280mm. 
 
An Orion glass solar filter was fitted to the lens for safe imaging and viewing of the Sun. Twenty images were captured with 1/500th second exposures and ISO100, pictures were stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4.

There was a little break in the clouds last night, so I quickly ran outside and took all the covers off the telescope and managed to get three short AVI movies of Mars before the clouds rolled in again!
 
Oh dear, I don’t think I’ll be able to get a clear picture of Mars for this opposition because of our La Nina situation here in Australia!
 
Images were taken with a Meade LX200 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.

My image is similar to this picture taken above from Hubble on the 26th August 2003, but of course it’s nowhere near as detailed. The terrestrial features outlined are the same as my image for reference; I just wished the sky had been clearer as I could have got an awesome image of Mars.
 
This (Annotated) image of Mars is taken from the Hubble site website.
News release IS STScl-2003-22
Release date: Aug 27th, 2003
Image Credit: NASA and Lisa Frattare (STScl)
https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2003/22/1385-Image.html?news=true

I finally had a chance for about an hour last night to take a couple of AVI movies files of Jupiter and Mars before the clouds came rolling in AGAIN!!!
 
Very frustrating at the moment with all this wet and windy weather :-(
 
Mars is showing some lovely detail on the surface as it heads towards opposition on the 8th December, but with all the moisture in the air it’s jumping around like a little jumping bean, which makes it very hard to capture this detail.
 
Images were taken with a Meade LX200 10 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and ZWO 120 MC camera with 3x Barlow lens attached. AVI movies were captured with 3000 frames each, stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS.

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.

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/

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)