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 CONVENTIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS 

Ursa Major  70mm lens 5 mins exposure on 200 ASA film (more stars are visible on the larger image)

The photo was scanned in, contrast increased, converted to grey-scale and the highlight, mid-tone & shadow values adjusted. On my image, stars down to mag 8 are readily visible.

A Lesson (or - don't throw away the bad ones !)

Here is a raw image as received from the photo-lab. It is a 2 mins exposure on 200ASA film with a 50mm lens. Bags of light pollution and poorly printed, but, somewhere in there can be spotted the Pleiades (centre - right).

After scanning, a small portion of the image was cut out and pasted as a new one , using Paintshop-pro. It looked like this :-    

After converting to grey-scale, adjusting values and application of an unsharp mask, this was the result.

   Not a bad picture of the Pleiades considering what we started from !

Here's parts of Gemini and Auriga   - a 5 mins exposure with a 135 mm lens on 200 ASA film. I've left this as a colour image with a bit of adjustment to highlight, midtone and shadows values.

CCD IMAGES - using a Philips Vesta Pro 680K webcam (see enlargements for details)

Saturn before processing.                                                            A poor Jupiter

Moon shots. The moon at 79% is a montage of two images, the full moon is 10 images combined.