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Welcome to my
Amateur Astronomy Page. My name is Paul and I'm a keen amateur astronomer living in Hampshire, UK,
about 30 miles west of London.
This page shows that it is possible to carry out astrophotography, even when living in
light polluted suburbs, if a modern CCD camera is used. My main interest is deep sky
photography and many of the pictures on this site are examples of galaxies and nebulae. I
also enjoy photographing the moon and planets so I have included some planetary and lunar
photographs as well.
Click on the links in the yellow
bar at the left to see the pictures.
Click above for the top 100 astronomy sites list and help put this site
nearer the top of the list ! - THANK-YOU
See
the open clusters in Auriga |
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See Jupiter
- now high in the South |
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See my
Southern skies pictures from Melbourne |
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See Saturn
- now in the South-West |
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All 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Lunar and planetary pictures are
generally short exposures, typically <1 second.
Click here to see how
it's done.
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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 !!
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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 8) 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 recently been using
Astroart 2, which is an
excellent piece of software.
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I hope you enjoy the photos !!
Paul
Let me know what you
think of my site
E mail me here
Visit my local
astronomy store here Astronomy World
See the
weather local to me
here
Try the great BBC Science and Technology
web site here
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This page was last updated on
15-Mar-2002.
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