Here I am with my Meade LX90 8" Schmitt-Cassegrain telescope. withIt has an Autostar control handset that has a database containing coordinates for a large number of stellar objects. This makes life a lot easier, some say too easy!

Here I am looking through it

   

    Mercury and Venus are inferior planets, which means that they are closer to the Sun that The Earth. Occasionally these planets pass across the Sun's disk at it's shadow can be observed from the Earth. Such an event is kown as a transit. In the case of Venus, transits are rare events. But this photo I took during the transit of June 8th 2004.

    Here are various views of The Moon. It's difficult to get good focus when photographing the moon because as well it's movement across the sky due to Earth's rotation, it also moving around the Earth at a fair lick, and the telescope has to work quite hard to keep the image in the same place.

    The Monn has several large dark patches, which are known as seas.  In the bottom rught corner is Mare Tranquilitatis, in which Apolo 11 crew landed. Just above it is Mare Serentatis. Towards the left is the smaller Mare Vaporum.

The prominent mountain range you see here is The Appenines. The crew of the Apollo 15 mission collected some rocks from these mountains.

    Here's Jupiter. There looks to be a red blob in the centre of the dark band below the equator. That might be the great red spot, or it might just be my imagination.

     Here is another photograph of Jupiter.  It was close to the horizon.    The bands are less distinct, but it looks more colourful.

    Here's  Saturn, my favourite among the planets. You can clearly see the Cassini divison and you can just see a band or two on the surface and the rings' shadow.

    Here is a photograph of Saturn, taken in March 2009. the rings were nearly edge-on.

    Here's a photo of Mars that I took in Ocotber 2005 when it was close to opposition. There is a hint of the northern ice cap at the bottom (if you magnfify this picture). The dark stripe is the Mare Cimmerion (I think).

    Here's  Venus, photographed on April 17th 2007. It was close to maximum elongation and slightly more than half is illuminated, as we see it. It appears blue on the left and red on the right. It was probably because it was quite low in the sky though and thus light of different wavelengths have been refracted through slightly different angles though our atmosphere. It's more obvious when the image is enlarged as it is below.

The French have entered the Space Age!


OK, that joke doesn't work because of ESA.

Here's a much better picture taken of Venus, taken in April 2007 while it was higher in the sky.

    The photos in the next section were all taken using my CCD camera, Starlight Xpress H16, with a 200 mm focal length camera lens. The H16 is a monochrome camera of limited resolution, but is very much more sensitive than the LPI.Aside from the celipse photo, all of were taken with a single exposure lasting several minutes. In each case the camera was mounted on top of somebody else's telescope, which was on a very sturdy and well aligned mount.  As of yet, I have been unable to reproduce this when mounting onto my own telescope, I have not been able to attain sufficiently accurate tracking. I am working on this!

Here's a photo I took of Comet Holmes a week after it exploded in October 2007. This was taken with the H16 camera. The exposure time was about three minutes.

    Here's a photo I took of the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. The exposure time was one minute.     This was just enough to catch a tiny bit of nebulosity; there is a bit just below the bright starjust below the centre of the picture.

    Here is M27,  the dumbbell nebula.

      I'm still very much a beginner when it comes to astrophotography. As I become more experienced, this page will hopefully start to look more impressive!

Here is another shot, but with a 10 second exposure. This was sufficient to some of the moons to appear.

   Here is a photograph of Cor Caroli, a double star in the constellation Canes Venatici, using the same set up.

    Here is a photograph, I took of the crescent Moon and Venus in January 2009. this was taken in my back garden. The crescent is partially obscured by branches.

 It was taken from inside an Airbus A360, when I flew to Shanghai on July 19, 2009. Here is another shot with an illuminated sky below.

        The cloud cover, decreased little later on. For is photo in which a Baader solar film filter was used.   It's a bit sharper, but you might detect a little chromatic aberration here (had focusing difficulties).

      Jupiter, on the night of August 20th 2009. 0.5s exposure.

3 moons are visible: Callisto, Europa and Ganymede. Io was too close to the over-exposed Jupiter to appear.