As regular readers will know in early August Catherine and I went off on a little trip to the Lake District which was largely enjoyable (bar the rubbish Virgin trains and to a lesser extent the rain). We stayed in Near Sawrey a few miles south-west of W… more »

The forecast was predicting heavy cloud cover after dark yesterday, but in the afternoon we had a clear spell. I used this opportunity to capture Venus and the Moon before the occultation. The following was taken at 15:34 UTC, a few minutes before the… more »

You don't get many days like this. The first image of an exoplanet around a Sun-like star has been released. Previously we had only visually detected a 5 mass Jupiter exoplanet around a brown dwarf star. Brown dwarf stars are too small to undergo any… more »

I took over 150 images on the 1st of August of the partial solar eclipse, time permitting I hope to put them all together to make an animation. In the meantime, here's a few images: Although it's hard to see in these images, the originals… more »

For the people hitting my blog in search of a higher resolution image of Saturn and Mars (and Gemini) that featured in June's Sky this Month section of Astronomy magazine here it is: Although the caption Astronomy magazine wrote was inaccurate, th… more »

So last night, after constructing a new holder for my 3x barlow lens out of cardboard I decided to have a bash imaging Mars. The rolled up bit of paper I had used for my images of Saturn and the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle, had fai… more »

Last night was very clear, so I dragged everything out to see what Comet 17P Holmes has been up to during the last 17 days. It has moved closer to Mirfak (Alpha Persei). It has also grown in size quite significantly, now it is about the same size as… more »

Well the skies have cleared at last, so I went outside for a little while to snap some pictures of 17P Holmes, which a few days ago recently brightened by a factor of a million becoming a magnitude 3 object. First up, the view through the telescop… more »

So here's the video I promised a few days ago. This was cut down from about 3 minutes of footage taken with my Toucam Pro II webcam at prime focus of my 150mm reflector (1200mm focal length). [video:soapbox:4f4d318f-0076-4b9f-838b-5724fa912b4a]Video:… more »

Now this makes a change from my other photos of the Space Station and Space Shuttle. I hooked my Toucam Pro II webcam to my 6 inch TAL 2M reflector (at prime focus) to take these. By my reckoning the middle two pictures here are at a distance of arou… more »