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 and recently with an Atik383L+. 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

Saturn

NGC 7331

I took this image of M51 with my new Atik 383L+ during some very hazy weather from11th April onward, not to mention the volcanic ash cloud overhead :-) but wasn't very happy with the result but after a lot of processing eventually here is the result. Binned 2x2 LRGB of 130:78:112:82 minutes in 2min subs. Astronomik type II 1.25" filters, 14" F5.2. Taken from Liverpool, UK. More results with the 383L+ here.

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 2009. 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