It has been a busy week shooting two very different night sky subjects. The first was to capture the Pleiades star cluster with the planet Uranus in the same field of view. I did a test shot of this a few months ago and finally dedicated an evening to capture this pairing. This was shot using a Nikon D850 and a Nikkor 180mm ƒ/2.8 Ai-S lens. This lens has become one of my favorites for short-telephoto shots of the sky. It’s pretty good wide open at ƒ/2.8 but becomes excellent at ƒ/4.0. This is a composite of 27x120second images. Image stacking was done using Siril.

A few days later it was time to catch the peak of the Geminid meteor shower. The moon did not rise until well after midnight so I had plenty of time to capture meteors in the late evening. The image is a composite taken between 2100 and 2159 MST while using a star tracker — and then blended with a foreground image taken earlier. Jupiter is the bright object in the center with Pollux and Castor to its upper left. The red star on the right is Betelgeuse. The meteor at top center left a long-lasting smoke trail.

Here are cropped versions of the bright meteor and the smoke trail.

Fortunately, it has been a warm December so far and standing around at night shooting photos is not as cold as it could/should be.  It won’t last.