The Rosette Nebula in Monoceros.

M1 the Crab Nebula - a supernova remnant.

M101 The Pinwheel Galaxy. You might notice a companion off to lower right - I will look it up when I remember. This was around 50 2 minute exposures unguided - I took it when we were on holiday and neglected to load the drivers for my guide camera! I threw away probably 30 more , but reasonably happy with the tracking anyway. Just could use more data.

This Is Clavius Crater - one of my favourite regions on the Moon.

Most of my Lunar and all my deep sky images have been taken with a Canon EOS 450D (previously a 300Dbut my partner inherited that!)

And heres Jupiter from May 2006. I believe the moon shown to be Europa.

Heres my Saturn from 2008 - It was taken with an SPC900 webcam, about 2000 frames, stacked for noise reduction in Registax and post processed in Photoshop. I've not touched it this year yet! The rings are edge on at the moment, so I think not quite as nice a target.

Heres M45, the Pleiades or Seven Sisters. Quite why Seven I'm not sure - Its an open cluster of young stars, not long after their formation (young stars tend to be blue) - also the nebular gas they were born in still being present is a bit of a give away! You might notice lines and patterns in the blue gas, to a large degree present due to the gravitational pull of the surround stars.

Around 2.5 hours in the image with another 2 -3 in post processing. Exposure lengths were around 8 minutes guided and stacked at 800asa

I use for pretty much all my deepsky work a 6 inch F5 Skywatcher refractor with a four inch f5 piggybacked for guiding or swapped around when I want a different field of view on a HEQ5 Skyscan mount, guided using an Orion Starshoot Autoguider. I also own a nice Revelation 10 Dobsonian Newtonian which has tube rings so that I can at a push put it on the mount (only for higher resolution planetary work in low wind and not GOTOing anything!)

As I progress with this blog i'll be including photos of my kit and further explanations should anyone ask, or be interested.