February 2025
Welcome to Hank’s January 2025 Astrophotography Blog. The big news this month was that 7 planets were stretched along the ecliptic of the night sky. If you were lucky and looked early in the month, you could see Saturn. It was close to the sun as it was setting in the west. You can still see Mars, Jupiter and Venus in the sky at night, but the others (Mercury, Uranus and Neptune) you can’t see unless you are looking through a telescope. The planets are spread across the sky, so it is difficult to capture it with a single photograph, so I took a series of images to catch the three planets that will be visible for a few more nights. While I was at it, I labeled the other bright stars in the southern and western skies: –Betelgeuse and Rigel are the top and bottom stars of the Orion Nebula, where between them you can see the belt and sword sheath of the hunter. –Behind and below Orion is his Big Dog (Ursa Major) with Sirius being the prominent star there. –Above the big dog is the small dog constellation (Ursa Minor) with Procyon being the bright star in that constellation. –Above Procyon are Pollux and Castor, the Gemini twins, with Mars sailing through that constellation. –Just below the planet Jupiter are 5 stars in a triangle that make up the horns of Taurus the bull. The (more than) 7-star cluster Pleiades is also in the constellation of Taurus….
