Welcome

Most of my recent images were taken with my 14" f5.2 Newtonian reflector from my heavily light polluted location in Liverpool using an Artemis 285 CCD camera. Observational astronomy is inevitably related to the weather conditions and so Meteorology is another of my interests. Details of the night-time cloud cover records that I keep can be found here.

Recent Images

The Galilean satellites are currently undergoing mutual phenomena i.e. satellites can eclipse and occult each other. Imaging these events is very challenging because of the tiny disks of the satellites but also Jupiter never gets more than about 22 degrees above the horizon for most of the UK this year.
This animation is composed of frames taken between 23:44 and 23:58UT on 15th August. 14" with 2.5X Powermate, DMK21AU04 and Wratten #25 plus IR block. 1 minute videos were taken at approximately 1 minute intervals and processed in Registax v5. The final frames were resampled 2x to make viewing easier. You can see the shadow of Io on Ganymede from about frame 6, it can be tricky to see so try and focus your attention on Ganymede (the moon that stays still).

Ganymede Eclipsed by Io

Comet 2007N3 Lulin

Taken on 1st March starting at 23:17UT with a William Optics 72mm refractor @f4.8. 40 minutes total exposure time using an Artemis 285 CCD.
This colour image is composed of separate RGB filtered images and a luminance exposure added in. The comet moved appreciably during the exposures so a sigma-clip method of combining the images was used to make the stars appear stationary and not as trails.

 

NGC4088 in Ursa Major with the recent bright type II supernova close to the core of the galaxy. This is an unfiltered exposure of 12min, 14" f5.2 Artemis 285 binned 2x2. NGC4088 is 55 million light years away.