Deep Sky Pix

UK based amateur astrophotographer. Everything is captured by me with my own gear. No remote observatories
No AI generated images
No downloaded data

31/03/2026

I don’t often photograph the moon but the Artemis II launch 🚀 inspired me to point my telescope at our rocky companion floating about 240,000 miles away.

Artemis II will take people further into space than ever before on a trip around the moon. There will be no landing or moonwalk on this trip though, this mission is about testing equipment and systems. The long term aim of Artemis is to set up a station on the moon as a base for missions to Mars.

This picture was taken from my balcony at home with a Celestron 8” HD telescope and Altair 26c camera. I decided to pull out the hues of the minerals on the moon’s surface; the blues are titanium and brown/orange tones are iron.

10/03/2026

My first attempt at a HSS colour palette image, where hydrogen gas is mapped to the red colour channel and sulphur is mapped to both green and blue channels. I think it creates a fiery appearance with its deep reds and smokey whites so it’s perfectly suited to the Rosette Nebula, seen here

02/03/2026

It’s the year of the Fire Horse in the Chinese zodiac, and deep in space there is a perfect symbol for the event - the Horsehead and Flame Nebula 🐴🔥.

24/02/2026

The Whirlpool Galaxy - 30 million light years away. It’s thought that the smaller yellow galaxy is passing behind the larger spiral and tugging on its arms, triggering rapid star formation.

It’s home to the first exoplanet to be found outside of our own galaxy and it’s around the size of Saturn.

This picture was taken from my balcony at home in the UK and is made up of around 7 hours of exposures, shot with an Altair 26c through an 8” Edge HD

23/02/2026

I like to try bring my astrophotos to life and give the impression of flying through deep space. The underlying photo is real - no AI here - and the stars are added as an animated effect in Blender. The Orion Nebula image was taken from my balcony at home with around 4 hours of exposures

$The Horsehead and Flame Nebula. I shot this with a DSLR and budget refractor telescope, great options for anyone startin...$

17/02/2026

The Horsehead and Flame Nebula. I shot this with a DSLR and budget refractor telescope, great options for anyone starting out in astrophotography. The key thing is patience! This image was built up over 4 nights; the first with a filter to collect the hydrogen gas and the following 3 with no filter to collect the colours. But those 4 nights spanned 3 months while I waited for clear skies. In total there are 10 hour’s worth of exposures in this single image.

10/02/2026

The Soul Nebula. I shot this image from my balcony at home over several nights, giving a total of around 19.5 hours exposure time.

The first time I processed this data was the first time I’d attempted a proper ‘Hubble palette’ image so I wanted to give it another try to get a better result. Plus we’ve been under a rain cloud for weeks now in the UK so I needed an outlet - I’m itching to get the ‘scope out again!

Details:
🔭 Skywatcher 72ED on Celestron AVX mount
📷 Altair Hypercam 26c
⏳L-eNhance Ha/Oiii: 109x300s = 9hr 5min
⏳6nm Sii/Oiii: 127x300s = 10hr 35min
🟰Total: 19hr 40min
🌌 Bortle 5 skies

06/02/2026

The Andromeda Galaxy captured from my balcony at home. I got some hydrogen-alpha data recently that I could blend into RGB images I took a while ago. Ideally I need a lot more to really make the nebulae pop (or maybe I’ll have to make the leap to a mono camera one day 🤔).

This is about 6.5 hours of Ha data and 6 hours of RGB data shot with an Altair 26c through a Skywatcher Evostar 72ED under Bortle 5 skies

11/01/2026

The festive/new year period brought a string of clear nights, which was great except the very bright full moon meant I had to be selective over what I could shoot. I managed to get some time on the Triangulum Galaxy on 26th December (shooting RGB before the full moon) and 2nd Jan (with a hydrogen filter while the moon was large). The galaxy was captured at 420mm focal length so I was surprised at the amount of detail - some of the larger star clusters in the galaxy itself are clearly visible, along with rich fields of hydrogen gas.

The galaxy itself is around 3 million light years away and is part of our local group, along with the Andromeda Galaxy.

Details:
RGB - 84x300s = 7 hours
Ha - 75x300s = 6.25 hours
Total = 13.25 hours

Skywatcher 72ED on iOptron HEM27
Altair 26c Pro Tec camera

26/12/2025

Following my last post, here’s another thing you can see with your naked eyes - the Orion Nebula. Maybe you’d struggle with light pollution in a city but with a reasonably dark sky you can see a faint fuzzy glow beneath Orion’s Belt (his ‘sword’). If you got a telescope for Christmas this is a great thing to have a look.

With long exposure photography we can pull out the faint clouds of dust and colours that our eyes alone can’t see.

Details:
🔭 Skywatcher 72ED on Celestron AVX mount
📷 Altair Hypercam 26c
⏳ 117x120sec (~4hours)
🌌 Bortle 5 skies

17/12/2025

One of the few things I post that you can see with your own eyes - the Pleiades star cluster. It takes long exposure photography to bring out the dust the stars are illuminating (this image here is around 3 hours of exposure time) but you can see the fuzzy cluster with the naked eye if you look to the right of Orion’s distinctive belt.

03/12/2025

The stars in my nebula pictures have always been plain white, which is a result of how I capture the images using narrowband filters. But this isn’t accurate as obviously there are a range of hues - some bluer, others orange or red. I never have the time to do another imaging run without filters to get the true star colours so when I saw there’s a script that can generate coloured stars from narrowband data, I had to give it a try! So here’s a fresh version of my Rosette Nebula using the NB_2_RGB script in Siril.

This was taken from my balcony at home with the following equipment;
🔭: Skywatcher 72ED on Celestron AVX mount
📷: Altair Hypercam 26c
⏳: Ha/Oiii filter: 90x300sec (7.5 hours)
⏳: Sii/Oiii filter: 108x300sec (9 hours)
🟰: 16.5 hours
🌌: Bortle 5 skies

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Hebden Bridge

Website

http://www.buymeacoffee.com/deepskypix

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