These are my hot off the press images. I put my best images here when I first take them and then later move them in to the Planets/Deep Sky/Solar sections later.
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I have finally got out with my new scope! I had to wait until there was an opening in the weather. The Jet Stream was not so favourable but I still managed to capture some good images of Jupiter and a couple of moons. Click on the images to get a full view. Just faintly to the left is IO and to the right is Europa. If you look closely there are what looks to be some dark blue wisps of cloud above the lower brown belt. Interesting.
Despite the cold and damp conditions my new telescope was still able to tease some images of Saturn and Uranus out of the haze! Uranus is very small as I could not use much magnification in the poor conditions. You can still see its blue-green colour very clearly.
Saturn is quite fuzzy due to atmospheric turbulence. The rings are still edge on and will be like that for a while yet.
Hopefully conditions will improve. One day soon Neptune!
These images of the partial Solar eclipse was taken with my Dwarf II in excellent weather 29th March 2025.
This image of the Orion Nebula (left hand) was taken with my Dwarf II in excellent seeing on night of 20th March 2025 in Norfolk by the sea. It took more than 3 hours to image. It is part of the Sword of the Orion constellation and is 1,344 light-years away. The second smaller image shows what a typical image under normal seeing looks like.
This image of the Rosette Nebula was taken with my Dwarf II in excellent seeing on night of 17th March 2025 in Norfolk by the sea. It took more than 3 hours to image. It is one of my favourites and its taken many attempts to get this. The nebula is in a region of our own Milky Way galaxy and is 5 Light Years away. It is a huge star forming region about 100 light years across.
Left hand image of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) was taken with my Dwarf II in excellent seeing on night of 17th March 2025 in Norfolk by the sea. The image is at an unusual angle as I had to tilt the camera to shoot past a building! Other images are taken at different times and seeing.
Image of Jupiter and its moons (4) taken on my Celestron 200mm SCT on night of 5th March 2025. Not often I get seeing good enough to image the moons. You can see the Red Spot faintly which is a storm that has been raging for 340 years but is now subsiding. Or maybe it is being covered by some new cloud activity.
Image of Uranus (about 1.5 Billion Miles away) taken on my Celestron 200mm SCT on night of 28th February 2025. This is first time I’ve ever successfully imaged it! Its a tough target in UK skies, you can’t see it by eye so getting it in the camera view was an achievement for me! Sky was clear but the imaging conditions (as usual) make the image blurry. You will need to zoom in to see the colour but no detail as the planet is covered in cloud.
Images of Mars taken on my Celestron 200mm SCT using a ZWO ASI Planetary camera. Mars was at its furthest in its orbit when this was taken and needed a great deal of magnification. Hence it's a bit fuzzy. Hopefully I'll get a better chance in the future.
Images of Saturn (about 810 Million miles away) taken on my Celestron 200mm SCT using a ZWO ASI Planetary camera on night of 17th Sept 2024. Although sky was quite clear it was gusty and the Moon was full and bright. This year the rings of Saturn are almost gone (middle image) and due to reappear later in 2025. But this is an optical illusion and happens every 13-16 years. Later image processing of the images taken that night (right hand image) showed a faint image of Saturn’s largest moon Titan close by which is rare. So I updated this image to show it. Left hand image was taken in 2023 for comparison.
Image of The Heart Nebula (about 7,500 light years away) take with Dwarf II in poor seeing and some light pollution on 3rd January 2025. This is an emission nebula of glowing gas and dust clouds. Its in the Cassiopeia constellation (a W shape high up in the sky). I did a bit of post processing to better bring out the colours to show the heart shape. Next time I will spend longer on imaging it.
