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Dan Monk Photography

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Dan Monk Photography

Astronomer and Astrophotographer working at Kielder Observatory under the dark skies of Northumberland

27/10/2026

Moonrise 🌕

Tonight’s 96% illuminated moon with a Halloween vibe. Not the shot I had in mind, but it eventually rose out of the clouds to grab a quick shot.

19/10/2026

The Seven Sisters in Ta**us ✨

If you’ve been out enjoying the clear skies over the last few nights, you may have noticed a small, fuzzy cluster of stars rising in the eastern sky. It’s a beautifully familiar feature, and seeing it at this time of year always brings a welcoming reminder of the return of Ta**us and the winter constellations.

Known as the Seven Sisters or The Pleiades, this is an open cluster of young blue stars only 100 million years old. While it looks uniform at a glance, this deep exposure actually captures two completely different cosmic phenomena:

The Reflection Nebula - The intense blue glow tightly wrapped around the stars. This is caused by the nearby starlight bouncing off a local cloud of interstellar dust that the cluster is currently traveling through.

The Integrated Flux Nebula (IFN) - The faint, smoky background dust framing the entire scene. This dust has no local star to light it up; instead, it is gently illuminated by the collective, combined glow of our entire Milky Way Galaxy.

Completely invisible to the naked eye, pulling this ghostly IFN out of the background darkness requires dark skies and hours of total exposure time.

I shot this at 135mm focal length over the last three nights, with a total exposure of 6.3 hours.

**us

11/10/2026

The Aurora last night, but late to the show! 😂

I was running a stargazing session during the best bits of the display, but it looked fantastic to the naked eye! On my way home I snapped this quick shot in a lay-by, but by that point it had lost its brilliance.

I hope everyone had a great night watching it 😁

08/10/2026

The North Star - as you’ve probably never seen it before! ✨

Last night the skies were near perfect, so I decided to try something I’ve never done before: point the camera at Polaris, the North Star, for over 6.5 hours.

That incredibly long total exposure allowed me to reveal something that’s usually hidden from view - the faint, diffuse Integrated Flux Nebula surrounding the North Star.

This incredibly subtle nebulosity sits at high galactic latitudes and is illuminated by the combined starlight of the Milky Way. Its extreme faintness makes it notoriously difficult to capture, but with enough exposure time, dark skies, and a little patience, it was possible from my own back garden.

Sony A7IV, Samyang 135mm f/2.
200x 120 seconds, f2.8, ISO 800.

27/09/2026

Tonight’s Moonrise!

I thought I’d give it another go tonight. Not quite what I was going for because the cloud ruined it at the critical time, but it was nice to see it again 😍

26/09/2026

Tonight’s Harvest Moon from Northumberland 🌕

Anyone else manage to see it rising?

26/09/2026

The Moon last night! 🌕

Not quite full, but almost. At time of capture, The Moon was 99.3% illuminated, hence why you can see slight texture in the craters along the left side.

The image is a stack of 50 frames taken with a 600mm lens, which has enabled me to gradually enhance the subtle changes in colour. The colours reflect the different rock types on the lunar surface.

23/09/2026

Tonight’s Moonrise 🌔

21/09/2026

The Soul of Earth’s night sky ✨

My most detailed image of the Soul Nebula I’ve captured, this object really does showcase the beauty or space, I could look at it for hours! Scroll to see the whole nebula.

A giant cloud of interstellar gas, 6,500 light-years from Earth. The Soul is around 150 light-years wide and those pillars of gas you can see within it are roughly 10 light-years tall.

Embedded in the gas cloud is the star cluster IC 1848. The high energy radiation from the cluster has forged a giant cavity in the cloud, pushing the gas into denser clumps in the outer region, which can trigger star formation.

I captured this data over several nights in winter 2024/25, and only just got around to editing it. For those that are interested, it’s a classic narrowband SHO image with a total exposure time of 16 hours.

Taken Kielder Observatory with a Takahashi FSQ-106 telescope and ZWO-ASI-2600MM camera.

Sulphur Filter - 3 Hours
Hydrogen Filter - 7 hours
Oxygen Filter - 6 hours

12/09/2026

A fiery river of star formation in Cygnus.

This incredibly huge network of interstellar gas spanning hundreds of light years, is full of active pockets of star birth within The Milky Way. The strong light from newly formed stars energises the hydrogen which causes it to glow a very particularly colour (656.3 nanometers if you’re interested 🤣).

Using a narrowband filter on my camera, that only allows that specific colour of light to pass, makes for higher contrast images of these gas clouds by blocking out intrusive and unwanted light sources. Although, that narrow amount of light does require much longer exposures to build up the signal.

Part of the Cygnus region of The Milky Way, it’s a great time of year to capture images of this because of its high altitude in the UK skies.

It was a lazy astro session in the garden last night due to the multiple all nighters I’ve done recently. I had one camera on this and one on the Andromeda galaxy, just to capture data for future projects.

The image has a total exposure time of two hours and was captured at 85mm. The final grayscale image has been colourised to reflect the typical red/pink of HII regions and I’ve also removed the stars to help reveal the intricate structures of nebulosity.

Isn’t it mad what exists up there! Oh, and it’s also a few thousand light years away!

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