Nice photographic opportunity tonight

We've gone from mild but pouring to clear but freezing. Surely there's at least one better weather permutation...

Thanks Mike.  Also at the unsociable hour of 3am in the morning, Aldeberan will be occulting the moon yet again!   I did a quick video of it last time, few weeks ago, in a silly nod to "mistaken" the event as the obliteration of poor Alderaan by the Death Star 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25yfKARlF2U

Mike, how will you try expose your shot with the moon in the frame, wont it wash out most of the cluster?  Or will you merge different exposures?

As it is forecast to be a nice clear night, I will head down to Kent after work, enjoy some darker skies and then have a stab at imaging this with my 50mm lens but this time, as you suggest Mike, I will stop it down to F2.8 or more.   I will take my refractor too and have one last go at Catalina and see if I can achieve a nice comet shot which thus far I have managed to botch my previous attempts 🙂

Mike, how will you try expose your shot with the moon in the frame, wont it wash out most of the cluster?  Or will you merge different exposures?

Yes, as you suspect, it'll have to be different exposure lengths if I want to get any detail on the Moon. The other option is to overexpose the Moon - which I'll do if there is a distinctive lunar halo.

I will stop it down to F2.8 or more

Yep, definitely needed. To be honest, for lunar shots, I often stop down even further, to sharpen up the lunar features. Exposure times are so short that you can get away with f/8 or so. For everything else, I keep it at around f/2.8.

I will take my refractor too and have one last go at Catalina and see if I can achieve a nice comet shot which thus far I have managed to botch my previous attempts

It's not the most photogenic of comets anyway! Quite hard to pick up any discernible dust tail, though the gas tail can be picked up easily enough. Pete Lawrence managed a good shot of it a couple of days ago:

Wow, Pete caught 3 tails!

ignore

Well, as it turned out, a little too tough to get any lunar detail and enough background stars to put the Moon into context in the sky.

So, I resorted to massively overexposing the Moon to produce an "in-camera" lunar halo, but, at the same time, showing plenty of stars in the Hyades cluster. Makes for an interesting composition... certainly not a classic!... but quite fun:

Moon in Hyades by Mike Meynell, on Flickr

<p style="text-align: center;">That is a fun image!  It was actually a very clear night, wasnt it?  really good seeing even with the glow of the moon.  Definitely the coldest night so far though! enjoyed looking at the craters on the moon with my SCT, havent done that for a while, could really push up the magnification too.</p>

It was actually a very clear night, wasnt it?

It was, yes. Looking good again tonight as well... but another cold one I think.

I popped up to Shooters Hill yesterday evening, as a non-member had got in touch with us, seeking help on setting up their telescope. They'd had it for 10 years, but had never used it properly believe it or not!

Got it all set up OK, and then popped out to their garden to do some observing! It was a relatively budget scope (only a 70mm refractor), but we got some really nice views of the Moon, Orion Nebula and the Pleiades.

After that I spent a short amount of time on Blackheath doing some imaging... but nothing I was particularly pleased with... which is why I thought I'd give up with the serious stuff, and take some overexposed shots of the Moon 🙂

The Moon is very bright tonight... so no chance of doing any imaging this evening. I may just pop out with some bins and scan the sky for half-an-hour or so.