The Sun and the Moon in Motion and Jupiter too!

 This fall I have been on a sabbatical from my teaching and focusing on lots and lots of backyard astronomy. 

One of my early observing goals was to capture the Sun every day for an extended period to show its rotation. I was able to image it every day for 17 consecutive days - from August 20th through September 5th. I then aligned the images to produce this animation showing the Sun's rotation:

Another interesting way to look at this is to add the images together, which produces this:

This nicely shows that sunspots occur in parallel stripes on either side of the Sun's equator.

I have also been able to shoot the Moon on consecutive nights to show its changing phases and the effect of lunar libration (a kind of tilting and rocking). Here's how the Moon looked from October 7th through the 15th, as it went from a waxing crescent to nearly full:

You should be able to see that the Moon looks to be somewhat growing in size - not just the amount illuminated by the Sun, but larger. This is because the Moon's orbit is not a perfect circle and over the nights I shot these the Moon was moving towards Earth.

And then after a few nights of clouds I was able to capture the Moon again from October 18th through the 27th, showing it moving through its waning phases:

Again, I think you can also see here that the Moon appears to be getting smaller. That was because it was moving away from Earth in its orbit.

I don't usually have the opportunity to stay up late (or get up early) enough to shoot the waning phases, so this was a treat.

I had another stretch of clear nights again in November and I was able to capture the Moon from November 6th through the 14th as it moved from a waxing crescent to full.

Finally, here's Jupiter and its moon Europa as they looked the night of December 14th.

This is about an hour and 20 minutes of motion showing Jupiter's Great Red Spot rotating out of view to the right, along with other cloud features in Jupiter's atmosphere. Europa is the spot of light to the left of Jupiter.