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.

Heres another, loads more to go, i've got a load of catching up to do - Better do it nor before I get my observatory dome up, but more on that later!

This is M31 The Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest galaxy to us at a distance of around 3 and a half minnion light years - so the light we are looking at from it now is from around the time when a certain plains ape started walking upright and bashing antelope over the head with a thigh bone!

There are two companion galaxies- the one nearest M31 being M32 and the further away (toward the bottom of the image) M101 (M standing for Messier - Charles Messier was a French comet hunter and put together a catalogue of stuff that could be mistaken for comets - perversely, while he did discover comets, he's rather better known for the catalogue)

Hi everyone, i'd been meaning to get around to this for a while, and my partner had set up a blog and had been badgering me to do it as means to share my (primarily!) astronomical images with anyone who might be interested.

My names Dean and I've been involved in amateur astronomy since about the age of 10 when my dad gave me some newspaper clippings he'd collected from the original Moon landings. Gods, I wish I still had them , not for the value but the sentiment and the history. Anyway, i've accumulated a mass of spaceflight related stuff since then chief among which is a photo signed by the entire Apollo 12 crew my partner bought for my birthday one year - very prized!

Anyway, just starting off in my first post, one of my favourite images, Messier 42/3 and the Running Man Nebula (it makes up the sword of the constellation of Orion. Its a star forming region in which our own sun formed in something roughly like. Probably one of the most striking deep sky objects there is. In total the image was probably of the order or 3 hours total imaging time with probably about the same time in post processing - But more on processing and the equipment I use later - Lets just get some of my images uploaded first - this whole blogging thing is new to me and feeling my way - mind you, easier than a web page!