On a cold and damp evening, before I changed over to taking images of galaxies and and globular clusters, I spent a few minutes on our nearest neighbour.

This was the best 700 images out of a total of 1000 taken, stacked in Affinity 2.

There was a brief clearing in the clouds on Monday evening, so I grabbed the chance to capture the moon and test out the work I've been doing to improve the motor guiding on my telescope. Very happy now, and looking forward to some clearer weather...

This is a combination of 100 1.334ms images taken using a ZWO ASI2600MC Pro camera, Starizona Nexus 0.75 focal reducer, and a Skywatcher 14" Goto Dobsonian telescope, stacked and edited in Affinity Photo 2.

Now that I've retired I might manage to get a bit more time out with my telescope. It will take a bit of time to relearn some techniques for taking photos through the telescope, but this one's a good start :-)

Single frame prime focus photo taken using a Canon 450D and a Skywatcher 14" Goto Dobsonian telescope.

Mars was closest in early October, but I didn't have an opportunity to try to take some photos until early November

This image was taken using a ZWO ASI 290MC Colour camera and Teleview 2.5x Powermate, connected to a Skywatcher 14" Goto Dobsonian telescope. 12,294 frames were captured in 63 seconds, and the video was processed in PiPP, Autostakkert, Registax, and Photoshop.

Jupiter and Saturn both reached opposition in July this year. This is the point when the Earth is pretty much in a direct line between a planet and the Sun, so we get a  fully illuminated view of the planet.

I haven't had the telescope out much this year, but the nights were clear, and the seeing was pretty good, so it was too good an opportunity to miss...

The black disc on Jupiter is the shadow of Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons. You can see Ganymede just to the left of the shadow.

Both of these images were taken using a ZWO ASI 290MC Colour camera and Teleview 2.5x Powermate, connected to a Skywatcher 14" Goto Dobsonian telescope. Roughly 30 seconds of video was taken for each planet, at 15 frames per second, and the videos were processed in PiPP, Autostakkert, Registax, and Photoshop.

We were down at Northcote High School helping out with their latest astronomy evening, showing people Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, but when the moon rose over the buildings my telescope spent pretty much the rest of the evening pointing at it. Anyone with a camera on their phone was able to get great photos, even allowing for a lack of contrast - there were no shadows to highlight the craters and mountains.

What a difference 37 years makes! Back when I was first trying to take photos of the moon, using a telescope borrowed from the science department at Burwood Teachers College, and an old Pentax SLR, the focus was always hit and miss, and I could never tell whether the photos were going to be any good until the film had been developed. Now just about anyone can get much better photos, just by holding their phone up to the eyepiece, and if the shot isn't quite right you can take another one straight away.

Here's one that I took on 18 August with my phone.

Beautiful and clear night on 30 May 2016!

On 22 May Mars was the closest to Earth that it has been for 10 years, and I've had the best views of it that I've ever seen. Saturn and Jupiter also being in the sky at the same time is an added bonus. These were photos I took through my telescope tonight. They've not been processed at all - I wanted to keep them as close as possible to what I actually saw through the eyepiece.

I managed to get a good set of shots of the last total lunar eclipse in Australia until 2018.

20 minutes later the clouds rolled in, so all in all a pretty successful night...