See Andromeda in the East and the Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda

See the square of Pegasus and a host of galaxies in the South

See Jupiter bright in the South

Most of the pictures were taken with a Starlight Xpress MX5 CCD which has a chip size of 4.9mm x 3.6mm and 510 x 290 pixels but recently I have been using an SXVF-M9 camera with an 8.7mm x 6.5mm chip and 752 x 580 pixels. I have used two telescopes and various 35mm camera lenses with the cameras and also with a DSLR land camera. I have also used a Webcam for imaging planets.

The first telescope I used for serious photography was a UK Orion Optics 10" f4.8 Newtonian reflecting telescope on a Vixen GP polaris mount with digital drives. Periodic drive error in this setup limited my unguided exposures to 1 minute, so all deep sky exposures were multiples of 1 minute exposures combined with the Starlite Xpress software.

My current 'scope is a Meade 10" LX200. This is used either in basic f10 mode or with an f6.3 or f3.3 focal reducer for wider fields or a Barlow lens yielding f24 or f33 for some planetary shots. This is also used in the unguided but driven mode. Exposures with this setup are multiples of single 1 to 5 minute shots, the limit on these again being dependent upon periodic error and also the f-ratio used.

Some pictures were taken with a telephoto lens attached to the CCD camera and guided by the main telescope. This gives a wider field of view, typically 1.5 degrees across for a 200mm lens on the MX5. I also have a digital SLR camera and am using that both through the telescope and guided by it. I have recently been using a 400mm lens with the digital SLR and guided by the main scope. This gives a field of view of about 2.5 degrees.

Lunar and planetary pictures are generally short exposures, typically <1 second. The lunar image to the right was taken with a DSLR through my Meade LX200 with an exposure of 1/200th second.  

Using a webcam can yield impressive results - like the photo of Jupiter on the left !Click here to see how it's done.

Although I have been an amateur astronomer for over 40 years, the photographs on this site were all taken since September 1997. In that time I have accumulated thousands of photographs - what is shown here are just examples !!

In all my astronomy I make good use of the Skymap planetarium programme, which I would highly recommend. This allows me to find and centre objects on the CCD chip and control the scope from the computer. SkyMap Pro includes the GSC and thus stars down to mag 16+ are included, which is a great help with CCD imaging. For image processing I have also been using Astroart, which is an excellent piece of software.

See my Southern skies pictures from Melbourne