When I was a boy, I received a telescope for Christmas, and it was amazing! I spent night after night sitting out in the cold with my telescope, gazing at the stars. I don’t recall the size of the mirror or the focal length, but it was good enough that I could see detail in the moon that had the hairs on the back of my head standing up, and on some really clear nights, I could just about make out a little green haze of the Orion Nebula. I don’t know what happened to that telescope. Maybe it turned into a Sunday lunch one week, like my sister’s rabbits did, when we were short of money.

The memory of those magical sessions never left me. Recently, now 45 years older, I realized that I was living in a part of Japan that, at a push, would enable me to take photographs of the night sky, so I took the plunge and bought a good but relatively inexpensive Sky Watcher Quattro 250P Newtonian telescope and their EQ6-R PRO equatorial mount. The learning curve has been steep, as I set everything up to be able to control my telescope from a computer and track celestial objects with some degree of accuracy. It doesn’t help that it’s summer here in Japan, so clear nights are not common, but on the few occasions where I’ve been able to set it up, I’ve gradually learned what works and what doesn’t, although there is still so much more learning ahead.

Before I’d figured out how to track the moon accurately, we had a total lunar eclipse on September 8, 2025, and the sky looked to be clear, so I headed up a nearby mountain as I’d learned of a parking area there that had pretty dark skies and a relatively low treeline on the side where the moon would set. It wasn’t a complete success, so my tracking still veered off over time, but running my polar alignment again made things much better, so I am confident that my problem now lies in being patient enough to really nail the polar alignment before attempting to track the moon for any length of time.

Because my tracking wasn’t great, I had to manually crop and align 2,000 images that I’d shot to make a timelapse, and because the shape of the moon changed, the auto-alignment in Davinci Resolve Studio didn’t work as well as I’d hoped either. Still, if we are lucky enough to get clear skies next March, we have another chance coming, so I’ll keep you posted if I improve on this, but here is the time-lapse I was able to create. I’ve embedded the timelapse below, showing as much of the eclipse as I could shoot before the moon slid behind the trees on top of the mountain shortly before it was due to set completely. Note that about halfway through the video, we see the stars behind the moon when the eclipse reaches totality.

I aslo made a video of me setting up the telescope, so if you are remotely interested, please check that out as well.

Anyway, I was really happy with the results of processing a single frame from my timelapse to show the stars that we can see behind the moon once the eclipse blocks out most of the suns light that would usually make the moon so bright that we cannot see any stars behind it, so I’m going to go on now to show you how I processed the image in PixInsight, which is an astronomy centric image processing package, and I’ll also show you how you could acheive similar results with Photoshop, which I know that most of you have access too. Here is that video, including the introduction I’ve shared in this roundup post.

I hope you found that interesting or useful. As you’ll see, I’m continueing to concentrate on putting together video content, and although I will make posts like this to keep you up to date, If you are interested in following my antics, please subscribe to the YouTube channel, as that is now the first place I post content.

Show Notes

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Sky Watcher Quattro 250P Telescope
Amazon – https://amzn.to/3Im1JPr
B&H Photo – https://bhpho.to/4n5yP56

EQ6-R PRO Equatorial Mount
Amazon – https://amzn.to/47LxTOC
B&H Photo – https://bhpho.to/4n4uTl5

Music by Martin Bailey