In astrophotography, it's one thing to get the absolutely perfect shot, but if you've got the equipment, why not use it to enhance your viewing during any night regardless of your viewing conditions? I wanted to share this image of Theta Tauri, because I think there is a lot that can be enjoyed even in less than ideal clear skies, without spending a lot of time on processing either, or waiting to process something for days. To demonstrate, I took this shot on Thanksgiving night, because I had the time to be out - not because the sky was perfect, in very quickly deteriorating skies from my backyard in Cudahy. The neighbors still had their party lights on, clouds were passing through and making the stars get giant halos, but then the clouds would dissipate and it was enough to come back and observe for another 10 minutes before warming up. 

As an MAS member, have you tried our Winter Sky Tour yet? If you do, then Orion and Taurus are starting to be great stops, with Taurus being your better bet to see earlier at night right now. I had my binoculars scouring the Hyades cluster, and it's a treat to see, contrasted with super bright Red Giant Aldebaran, eye of the bull, to the right is a very colorful region of the sky known as the Hyades open star cluster. This is rising at a very good angle in the sky right now around 9-10pm, after work and not too late that it's unreasonable to be out and enjoying a look. When you're at the MAS, or just in your backyard, look below the Pleiades cluster, just above the belt of Orion and have a look in Taurus with binoculars and a wide field telescope. Try to take a picture even, you don't need a very long exposure.

Overall, I gathered about 2 hours of 120 second frames in this region, shown below here at about a 640mm focal length with my Vixen Quad APO telescope and a ZWO 2600mc camera. Later on, when I had time to browse through, I discarded over half of my data, and kept about 40 minutes of frames which I processed here quickly in under an hour via Astro Pixel Processor. Rather than try to leave out the blotches caused by clouds and sky gradients, I kept some of the background gradient and halo effect in as an example of what you'd see in a quick photograph with wispy clouds. My processing was a tad on the green side, but it is what it is - us one shot color camera users have to try extra hard at pulling green out of our images, but sometimes it's not worth the battle.

Despite the conditions, there is still plenty to see here in this region of the sky, and astrophotography techniques let us pick out the smaller stars in the background of this open cluster. This is only a portion of the Hyades by the way, and here we're focused in on a double star region of contrasting yellow and blue, although it is a little more green here in this version, also known as Theta Tauri. In the center, 02 Tauri, aka Chamukuy, is about 148 light years from the sun.