The Monkey Head Nebula

Per my previous post, my Celestron CGEM equatorial mount had been out-of-action for the last few mounts due to a dead motherboard. I managed to replace it recently and this is the result of a test image using the new board. I'd say it works fine!

Below is an image of the nebula in Hubble HSO palette. In this HSO palette rendering of the Monkey Head Nebula (NGC 2174), the dominant color story is a warm golden-amber wrapping the exterior shell, representing sulphur-II emissions from the cooler, denser ionized gas at the nebula's outer boundary. That golden envelope gives way inward to the striking blue-white core, where hydrogen-alpha and oxygen-III combine to create the luminous, cloud-like interior — the OIII in particular driving that icy blue glow around the embedded star cluster. The dark intrusions you can see cutting into the rim are dust lanes and molecular cloud structures silhouetted against the emission.

The Monkey Head Nebula (NGC 2174) is a vibrant emission nebula and active star-forming region located ~6,400 light-years away in the constellation Orion. Associated with the open cluster NGC 2175, it features glowing hydrogen gas sculpted into complex, chaotic shapes by stellar winds from young, massive stars. 

Image Details:

- Imaging Scope: William Optics 61mm ZenithStar APO

- Imaging Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Color with ZWO DuoBand filter

- Guiding Equipment: Celestron Starsense Autoguider

- Acquisition Software: Sharpcap

- Guiding Software: Celestron

- Light Frames: 25*5 mins @ 100 Gain, Temp -15C

- Dark Frames: 10*5 mins

- Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker

- Processed in PixInsight (incl. Star Removal using Starnet2), Adobe Lightroom and Topaz Denoise

Performing Surgery on a Telescope Mount

My main scope's mount has been dead for a few months. Long story short, the Celestron CGEM mount's motherboard fried somehow. It caused a ton of issues prior to Christmas, which included severe DEC and RA runaway and, ultimately, the inability to connect to the mount at all. 

I ordered a new motherboard from Agena Astro which they shipped quickly and packed very well. I'd been delaying the task of installing it for a while because, frankly, there are no instructions and working on the innards of things scares the heck out of me. But, I carved out some dedicated time got it done yesterday. It was extremely easy, to say the least. It took me about 30 minutes overall and essentially was a basic switch-out. I also regreased the motor mechanisms for the drive while I was in there. 

Powering it up, the mount responded perfectly. Once it got dark, I ran through the basic alignment process, then reconnected the Celestron Star Sense Auto Guider system. Again, the new motherboard registered it and conducted a four-point alignment quickly and with precision. This all led to several hours of flawless imaging, the results of which I'll share another time. The mount really behaved like it was brand new again.

Makes me a happy chappy!

Solar Activity In 2025-2026

The sun has certainly been doing its thing during this current peak. The sun operates on an roughly 11-year cycle of activity, driven by its magnetic field. Because the sun is a ball of plasma rather than a solid body, different latitudes rotate at different speeds — the equator spins faster than the poles. This differential rotation gradually winds and twists the sun's magnetic field lines until they become tangled and stressed. At the cycle's quiet phase, called solar minimum, the sun's surface is relatively calm with few sunspots. As the magnetic field grows increasingly tangled over the following years, activity ramps up toward solar maximum, when the sun is peppered with sunspots — dark, magnetically intense regions on the surface. Some of these can be seen in the above image, which was taken with my Dwarf3 telescope and its included solar filter on December 2, 2025.

At these peaks, the sun throws off far more solar flares (intense bursts of radiation) and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — massive clouds of charged particles hurled into space. When those particles reach Earth, they can trigger stunning auroras at much lower latitudes than usual, but they can also disrupt GPS signals, radio communications, and even power grids in severe cases. After maximum, the magnetic field essentially "resets" by flipping its polarity (north and south magnetic poles swap), and the cycle begins winding down toward the next minimum — making the full magnetic cycle technically 22 years, though the 11-year activity cycle is the one most commonly referenced.

We witnessed intense aurora activity, even as far south as the central Texas area. The image below shows aurora over Texas just north of the Austin area in late November, 2025.

We are currently in Solar Cycle 25, which began in December 2019 and has been notably more active than forecasters initially predicted — its peak around 2024–2025 has already produced some of the strongest geomagnetic storms in two decades.

The Double Cluster

 

The glorious Double Cluster in Perseus. People that I teach astronomy to really enjoy looking at this through the eyepiece! It's a real gem of the night sky, both visually and photographically.

Image Details:

- Imaging Scope: William Optics 61mm ZenithStar APO

- Imaging Camera: ZWO ASI183MC Color with IR Cut filter

- Guiding Scope: William Optics 31mm Uniguide

- Guiding Camera: Orion Starshoot Auto Guider

- Acquisition Software: Sharpcap

- Guiding Software: PHD2

- Light Frames: 20*4 mins @ 50 Gain, Temp -10C

- Dark Frames: 20*4 mins

- Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker

- Processed in PixInsight, Adobe Lightroom and Topaz Denoise

Telecomm Moon

 

The full moon for February, 2024 rises behind a telecommunications tower in Central Texas,