A Wealden Wood in December and Peering into the Night Sky

 Although the woods have shut down for the winter, there are still things to be found. Small birds band together and move through the trees looking for food and I regularly put up a Woodcock as I walk through the understorey looking for fungi and slime moulds.

Artist's Fungus (Ganoderma applanatum)

Ochre Brittlegill (Russula ochroleuca)

Wood Blewit (Lepista nuda)

This is a species of Slime Mould, probably Reticularia lycoperdon.

I occasionally come across a winter casualty.

This shock of blue, laying in the leaf litter, is a dead Nuthatch (Sitta europaea)

One of the astronomical events of the year was the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. I started watching the converging orbits of these gas giants back in September, when they were easily visible in the south-eastern night sky. Conjunction (where Saturn passes behind Jupiter and they appear in the sky as one bright "star") was due to occur on 21st December in the south-western sky but alas, my attempts to observe it were thwarted by overcast skies. The skies cleared on 24th December and I managed to get some shots of the planets as they were moving away from each other.

This shot shows Jupiter on the left, with the more distant Saturn on the right. Even allowing for distortion, I fancy you can just make out the ovoid shape of the ringed Saturn.

I decided to take a rather Heath-Robinson approach to try and get a photograph of Jupiter.

Using my bird-watching telescope, with eyepiece on full zoom and taking the resulting view by holding my bridge camera against the eyepiece, I managed to get the following image.

 Sure, it's not up to Hubble standard but at its closest to Earth, Jupiter is over half a billion kilometres away!!