After the earlier excitement at seeing Mercury I aligned the skywatcher, I wanted to get some tracked images of my favourite constellation Orion. It's my favourite probably because it's one of the few that I could identify as a youngster.

Anyway, I was looking around when I noticed that a star just to the right of Orion seemed unusually bright, i.e. I hadn't noticed it before at all as being as bright as that. Next thing my wife was calling me to help with something. When I got back outside my bright star had disappeared.

So, it was a supernova, or more likely a plane or satllite :o(

Got a couple of tracked pics of Orion....



Not brilliant at this resolution but shows quite a lot of detail at full res.

Left the scope outside to hopefully get view of Saturn later