November 2025

Welcome to Hank’s 2025 Astrophotography Blog. Orion is such a spectacular constellation to photograph, in part because its nebulas are so detailed and big. The best way for me to capture big objects is to use my Hyperstar lens, which captures nearly 3 degrees of sky, and because it has a focal ratio of 1.9, it can capture lots of data in a fraction of the time my f/10 setup can. So, this month I’ve been using the Hyperstar to good effect. To start off with, here is NGC2024, the Flame Nebula with the Horsehead Nebula.

The thing that bothers me with the photo above, is that the red streak of nebula goes past the image. I could have rotated the camera to get more of it in, but I wanted to have a nice star field around the nebula, so I took two photos and created a 2-panel mosaic.

Also in Orion’s “sword” area, is M42, the Orion Nebula. Close by is the Running Man Nebula, so I took two photos and created a Mosaic of this piece of sky.

I was able to use the Hyperstar lens to capture most of NGC1499, the California Nebula in Perseus. Seeing it upright almost makes it look like California, but the placement of San Francisco Bay seems a little too far east, and the Sierras could extend a bit further south, I think.

Next up is M45, the Pleiades or 7 Sisters. It is an open star cluster that is visible in December climbing in the southeast early in the evening. It looks like a little starry fuzzball, and on a clear evening you can see its most prominent stars looking blue. It figures large in the mythology of many cultures. The Japanese name for the Pleiades star cluster is Subaru, which means “to unite” or “gather together,” which is what happened when several companies in Japan merged, adopting the name and placing a logo of the stars on their cars.

Comet/2025 K1 (Atlas) is a recently discovered comet from the Oort Cloud. With high powered telescopes it can be seen to be breaking up, and as of the morning I photographed it, it was in three or four pieces. I captured this comet from my home telescope, using the Hyperstar lens, and wasn’t able to see the breakup, as I wanted to get a picture of it in the field of stars it was going through.
The Oort Cloud is theorized to be a cloud of billions of icy solid objects surrounding the Sun, ranging from .03 to 3.2 light-years in diameter. It is from this Oort Cloud that long period comets keep coming into our solar system. The outer limit of the Oort cloud defines the outer boundary of our solar system.
The names of comets can tell you something about them. C/2025 K1 (Atlas) indicates it is a non-periodic comet ( C ), and was first discovered in 2025. The K means it was discovered in the 2nd half of the month of May, the “1” indicates it was the first comet discovered in the K time frame and was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) which is a robotic astronomical survey and early warning system funded by NASA and operated by the University of Hawaii. The ATLAS telescopes are located in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa and are continually scanning the sky for moving objects, like comets. It is my understanding that this comet was discovered by the telescope in Chile. If a giant asteroid is headed for Earth, these telescopes may very well give us time to worry about it.

This month Marianne and I traveled to my favorite remote location just west of our home in the Black Hills, above Jewel Cave to see the comet that has been in the news lately, Atlas 3i. We traveled to that site as the comet peaked its head up above the horizon before the Sun hid it from view. I had my portable Seestar S50 telescope, and though I could not see the comet with binoculars, the fuzzy ball showed up through the Seestar. It is drawing attention in the media because it came to us from outside the Oort Cloud—outside our solar system (the lower case letter in the name 3i means it is an interstellar comet). Its tail is very faint as it is not made of icy stuff, like most comets, which warms up spewing a tail as it approaches the Sun. Comet tails normally point away from the Sun, as the solar radiation pushes the tail in that direction, but the Atlas 3i tail points toward the Sun. Scientists think this may be due to the gasses it is releasing being made of nickel and iron rather than icy stuff. Rumors in the media about this comet being sent to us by interstellar aliens have not yet panned out, but it has changed its brightness unexpectedly. It will be closest to Earth on Dec. 19th, when it will be 170 million miles away.

Finally, this month had another Aurora Borealis showing in the Black Hills, with these photos taken near Crazy Horse Memorial and the last by Stockade Lake.

Until next time, Clear Skies! -Hank