Astronomy

Solar System

These pictures have been taken since 2004, mainly from my back garden in Bolton, mostly using a Philips TouCam webcam, attached to a Celestron 200mm SCT telescope. The images have were processed with the excellent Registax and IRIS programs.

Saturn in April 2007, showing the Cassini division in the rings Jupiter in October 2010, with the Southern Equatorial Belt missing Mars in December 2007.
Venus crosses the Sun's disc in June 2004. This rare transit event happens only twice every 180 years, and amazingly it wasn't cloudy! The Moon passes in front of Saturn in March 2007 The end of the total lunar eclipse in March 2007

The Sun viewed through a hydrogen-alpha telescope in April 2011, showing sunspots and solar flares.

In addition to the our ever-present neighbours the planets, the inner solar system is often visited by comets. I've seen quite a few of them in recent years - have a look at my pictures here.
And look at this animation of Comet 103P/Hartley moving against the background stars over a 75-minute period one evening in October 2010:

Comet Hartley imaged with my Pentax K110D SLR and a 200mm lens.

"Deep sky" objects

The following images were captured using a Starlight Express MX5C CCD camera, attached to a 20cm telescope.

M27, the Dumb-bell nebula, an expanding shell of gas some 815 light-years away. M57, the Ring, another gas-shell planetary nebula, at a distance of 1,140 l.y. M13, a globular cluster of 300,000 stars, at a distance of over 23,000 light-years.
The M51 galaxy is known as the Whirlpool, and is 15 million light years distant. The great M31 spiral galaxy in Andromeda, as it was 2.3 million years ago. The M82 galaxy in Ursa Major is much further away than the stars which form that constellation: 17 million light-years.

Have a look at this page to see more details of the equipment which I use.