When you look through the eyepiece of a telescope, a few celestial objects are guaranteed to make you say ‘wow!’ – the moon with its mountains and craters, Saturn surrounded by rings, Jupiter showing off its stripes and Galilean moons.

But it’s not until you use a camera to create long exposures that the faint, deeper universe begins to properly reveal itself. And it does this in the most astonishing way. Galaxies, nebulas, comets, supernovas - all these appear in detail you might not have thought possible.

This is what drew me into astrophotography – an endless supply of ‘wow!’ moments delivered by photons of light, some of which have travelled for millions of years to reach the sensor on my camera. Welcome to Earth photons!

Here is my journey so far.

I am a London-based Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. My images are taken in the UK and Canada’s Vancouver Island.

Thank you to my wife Alixe for her encouragement during the sleepless nights, joys and frustrations of this wonderful pursuit.

The Magnificent Milky Way

You don’t need a telescope to be an astrophotographer. The Milky Way presents a whole world of possibilities for a DSLR camera and wide angle lens.

Mosaics

If your target is too big to fit in your field of view, a mosaic provides an excellent solution.

Pleiades open cluster

Time-lapse

I recently began making time-lapse videos. Here are my first efforts.

Moon Shots

Waxing gibbous mineral moon

The Moon is a great beginner target for the budding astrophotographer - it’s easy to capture, even from a heavily light-polluted city.

Hardware, software and how I use it.

Terrestrial Tools