October 2025

Welcome to Hank’s October 2025 Astrophotography Blog. We were traveling for much of the first half of the month, but before we left, I was able to get almost 10 hours of light from the Fireworks galaxy. It’s about 25 million light years away and got its name because of the high number of supernovae, or stellar explosions that have been observed in its arms.

At a BHAS Star Party event at our Hidden Valley Observatory, I was using my Seestar telescope and checked out Saturn. Saturn is looking different than you might expect at this time as the ring that goes around it is edge on with the Earth, meaning that it doesn’t look like a donut around the planet, but more like a ball with a skinny line through it. The Seestar camera sensors doesn’t have many pixels, so the image doesn’t show much detail. The first image shows just Saturn. In the second image I increased the exposure/gain and was able to pull out blurry images of a couple of Saturn’s moons, to the left. Close to Saturn, on either side, appear to be two other moons, but their positions didn’t line up with what the Sky and Telescope Saturn’s Moons graph indicated where they should have been. If you’ve ever been curious about where Saturn’s moons may be at any given time, you can go to https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/plugins/observing-tools/saturn_moons/saturn.html and it will show you where five of Saturn’s 274 moon’s might be. You’ll need to convert your time/date to Universal Time to use the calculator, which can be done at https://savvytime.com/converter/utc

” “

At the Star Party and later at home I set up my Seestar and collected about 2 ½ hours of light over 2 nights with M17, the Omega Nebula. In the year and a half that I have owned the Seestar telescope, the company has continued to provide upgrades to the software that have really enhanced its capabilities. It now can track objects equatorially. I’m still trying to figure out the mosaic function that allows for a wider field of view and hope to report here soon on my progress with that.

The highlight for me this month was driving out to my favorite spot north of Jewel Cave with Marianne on Mud Springs Road, that has a great view of the horizon. Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) was reportedly up in the sky, and I wanted to catch it before it dips below the horizon. We went out just after sunset and it didn’t look very promising as there were plenty of clouds in the West and smoke from controlled burns at Jewel Cave. Using my Stellarium iPhone app I was able to see where it was supposed to be, but all I could really spot was a little fuzzy blob that didn’t show a comet tail. I set up the Seestar and it found the comet between the clouds, so I started taking photos. I set the camera to take 10 second exposures and was able to get 19 of them. When I got home I processed the 19 and here’s how they turned out. The image shows not only the tail of ice and dust that gets warmed up from the solar radiation of the Sun, but the thin ion tail, that is the result of energetic particles that get excited when the comet “turns on” as it get closer to the Sun’s radiation. The solar radiation pushes the two tails away from the Sun. The comet was said to be a green or blue color, but I think the red in my image was from the smoke from local fires. When I took the photo, the comet was about 56 million miles away.

Another comet, the interstellar 3i/Atlas will be appearing early in the morning before sunrise in the East in middle of November where I am in the north country. This one is getting attention because most of our comets come from within our solar system. Comet 3i/Atlas is from beyond our solar system and as it was getting closer scientists detected that it was emitting a nickel gas, which was very unusual. It is only one of 3 visitors from beyond our solar system that has been discovered.

Until next time, Clear Skies! -Hank