See the ring nebula in Lyra

See the the great Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules - high in the sky now

See Jupiter low 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 pixcels. I have used two telescopes and two 35mm camera lenses with this camera. I have also been experimenting with the use of 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 200mm f3.5 lens or a 50mm f2 lens attached to and guided by the main telescope. This gives a wider field of view with the MX5 CCD, typically 1.5 degrees across for the 200mm and 6degrees for the 50mm.

Lunar and planetary pictures are generally short exposures, typically <1 second. Using a webcam can yield impressive results !

Click here to see how it's done.

Although I have been an amateur astronomer for 30 years, the photographs on this site were all taken since September 1997 with my MX5 CCD camera. In that time I have accumulated hundreds 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. The latest version (SkyMap Pro 11) 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 2, which is an excellent piece of software.

See my Southern skies pictures from Melbourne