Here is a selection of some of my astrophotographyimages. The equipment used to produce the images varies greatly depending on the subject matter - i'll try and put a brief description alongside each section. Later on, I may add more detailed information on the techniques used but for now enjoy the pictures!

Quick Links: aurora - stars - planets - moon

Satellites and the International Space Station

Satellites - there are hundreds of these in various orbits around the world. You only have to stand outside for 5 or 10 minutes on a dark evening and you're almost guaranteed to see some! Some are more interesting than others. The International Space Station (ISS) is large compared to most other orbital items, and thanks to its large solar panels, it appears bright too. Generally for a given area it will spend a week or two making frequent passes before disappearing for a while.

"Iridium flares" are another one to look out for - the Iridium satellites are pretty reflective and spin their way around their orbit meaning if you are in the right place at the right time, they brighten dramatically as their panels reflect the sunlight to your location. For predictions of these, and more, you can register on the highly useful heavens-above site. Below is a picture taken at 23:04 on the 20th July 2008. The ISS is passing overhead and an Iridium Flare can be seen lower down on the left at the same time!

I was lucky enough to have this shot published in the October edition of BBC Sky at Night magazine!

Aurora - the northern lights
In October 2003, the sun produced a flare of energy that later hit the Earth's protective magnetic field. The unusually large flare meant that the northern lights - the aurora - were visible much further south than normal. The images below were taken on Fuji Superia 200 film, and the exposures varied from 20-50 seconds or so.

New: Time Lapse Video from the Aurora in Nov '2004
Click here to download (1Mb, DivX Video Codec required to view)

Stars
A lot of astro-photography is quite tricky, with much to learn including techniques and equipment. There are some easy ways to get started though, and with relatively modest equipment. The first few images below show "star trails". As the earth rotates, the pattern of stars rotates overhead. If your camera has a "bulb" setting, you can capture this movement by exposing the film for a long period of time - anything from a few minutes to a few hours. The only real problems are combatting light pollution (dark skies are a must!) and also keeping an eye out for the lens misting up on cold nights.

The next level from imaging star trails is to add a motorised mount. This enables the camera to rotate at the correct speed and angle so that it effectively cancels out the Earths rotation. The end result being that the stars don't move. There are dedicated mounts available for doing this, however for simplicity I simply bolted the camera to my telescope mount. I am looking to make a dedicated camera mount at some point as the telescope one is large and heavy and overkill for a simple widefield imaging session! From left to right the images below are:
Summer Milky Way - a shot taken into the plane of our home galaxy you can see the shadows of dust trails. Although the sky looks bright it was actually late at night and dark when this was taken
M45 (The Pleiades) from afar - low in the sky, light pollution was a problem here.
M45 (The Pleidaes) close up - this was taken through the telescope by attaching the camera body to the 'scope directly and using the telescope itself as the lens. This sort of photography is an order of magnitude harder - alignment must be spot on, and the exposure needs more work. This image is over exposed, and you can also see the stars have trailed slightly. This could be due to inherent error in the 'scope drive, wind, or bad polar alignment. The learning curve gets steeper...!

Summer 2008.
I took a series of images with my Sony DSLR with the camera mounted on the telescope drive. My aim was to try and catch some of the summer Milky Way, but the individual exposures weren't really long enough. However, the constellations of the summer triangle are nicely shown - in the second image I've added some faint lines to help define them!

	First attempt at Saturn: Small and a bit rubbish really, but was still exciting to see it on the screen!
	Next attempt (March 2004) Much better. The addition of the barlow lens enlarges the image. More time spent processing and less brightness in the base .avi file yields a big improvement. At the time of writing (Nov '04), Saturn is returning to the evening skies so I will be able to try again soon.
	First attempt at Jupiter Not a bad first go, but more work needed - I think more frames were required in the stack on this one.
	Venus transit 2004 I haven't imaged Venus at night yet, but in 2004 the planet transited (passed in front of) the Sun. This event is pretty rare (the last was in 1882!). This image is a couple of the ones I took on the day by simply holding a digital camera up to the eyepiece on the telescope.
	Mars - October 27th 2005. This is my first attempt at imaging Mars, and came out OK considering some problems! Firstly, the seeing wasn't great and there was a light haze, so it never really snapped into focus. In addition, the layout of the current house I am living in meant I was imaging Mars directly above the roof so that adds more image degradation! In any case, after processing in Registax, the images have come out reasonably, and you can see the dark "Mare" across the equator of the planet easily.
	Saturn - February 18th 2006. A nice clear night with good seeing. The view through the eyepiece was immediately much better than the last time I took a look at Saturn - my latest attempts at collimation may have helped. The two images on the left were created in Registax from avi's containing around 1000 frames.
	Saturn - April 1st 2008. Not a bad attempt - the colours look a little better in this one than the previous shot. The main interesting thing about this image is to see how the rings have closed in over just a couple of years - soon they will be all but edge on to us. The cassini division is just about visible as a slight shadow in the widest parts of the ring.
	Mars - 16/12/2007 Not sure why I hadn't posted this shot earlier! Much better result than the images from 2005, thanks to Mars being relatively close to us, improved collimation, and decent sky.
	Jupiter - September 2008. I don't really think this shot is much better than my previous attempt back in 2004! Unfortunately the planet was very low down in the sky so I was peering through an awful lot of air- just focusing was hard enough. Still - the main bands are visible.

The Moon
The moon is an easier object to image simply because its size and brightness means most photos can be done on a "single shot" basis - no long exposures or tracking needed!

	First moon image - taken by holding my digital camera up to the eyepiece of the telescope. Actually quite hard to do as the field of view is so small!
	Another early moon image - this time I had used the barlow and 7.5mm eyepiece to get close in. The circle occurs as the image field of view is tiny with this eyepiece. dark and blurry but close up!
	For this image, I attached my SLR Camera to the telescope without any eyepieces. This makes the telescope the camera lens and gives a much clearer image. When the moon is next up, I'm going to try using my camera's 2x adapter to get more detail. 1/125s, Fuji Superia 200. The telescope is f/8 (6"/1200mm focal length)
	06 December 2008. This image was taken with the moon at almost 50% phase. Unlike the shots above, the angle of the light here means that the features are more visible, especially the craters down the line of the terminator. I've labelled some of the features on this image.
	This picture is the above but without the labels. Taken with a Sony A100 DSLR body mounted directly on to my Tal 2M Telescope. 1/125 sec at ISO 200.

Comets
Comets are unpredictable things. Often, one that is predicted to become bright fails to, and sometimes, the opposite happens; a comet that is predicted to stay small and dim in the sky will suddenly put on a fantastic show. These "dirty snowballs" have interesed people for years.

	Comet 17/P Holmes brightened considerably in late October 2007 as a large cloud of gas escaped from it, presumably due to a crack in the icy core splitting open. Unfortunately, it's been cloudy most of the time here, however I did have chance to grab this picture with my DSLR during a brief break in the cloud cover.
	This view was taken by mounting my Sony A100 DSLR directly onto my telescope in place of the eyepiece. You can see a bright point close to the centre of the gas cloud, that I'm assuming is the comet's main core.
	This is a close-up crop from the previous image.