The Rosette Nebula is “a vast star-forming region, 100 light-years across, that lies at one end of a giant molecular cloud in the constellation Monoceros. The nebula is estimated to contain around 10,000 solar masses. The nebula is located about 5,000 light-years away from Earth.” The whole nebula is much too big to capture using the […]
My Samsung Galaxy S22 phone has an extra free camera app called “Expert Raw“. As the name suggests it allows the phone camera to save RAW files as well as the normal JPGs. Within in the app there’s also a “night mode” which takes long exposure images. There is some additional witchcraft going on though […]
The 1990s were an interesting time for consumer grade electronic music. Digital was slowly taking over the synthesis domain and making dedicated MIDI sequencers a reality. The price was still on the high side but the design principles and general approach have stood the test of time. Thirty years on these units are still viable […]
I’ve moaned on here a few times recently about the inclement weather but the other night the clouds parted and I got a clear view of the sky for once. I took out my Seestar telescope, not expecting too much, and pointed it at the Horsehead nebula ( bottom IC 434 ) and was very […]
One of the characteristics of living on the south western side of the British Isles is that you get up close and personal with the occasional bit of serious weather. In this case it was Storm Chandra which washed up the remains of this rather substantial tree ( I don’t think that the term driftwood […]
We’ve just returned from another week’s cross country skiing and walking in the Vosges mountains in France. The snow cover wasn’t brilliant and the weather a bit mixed but this is the sunset one evening The low angle of the sun makes the shadows so much more interesting and I love the “above the clouds” […]
Every now and again you come across some industrial relic and wonder “what’s that doing there?” Back in the summer I’d taken the car for its annual service and, rather than hang around while the garage did its thing, I went for a walk. About half way round I came across this rail embedded in […]
This is the super moon from the night of 4th December 2025, taken using the Seestar S50. The process was as follows: Capture a 2 minute RAW video. Getting the exposure right on a full moon isn’t easy and I found the best way was to use the manual exposure control on the Seestar […]
A recent image from the Seestar S50 smart telescope. This is Bode’s Galaxy, M81 in the Messier catalogue. It was first discovered by Johann Elert Bode on 31 December 1774 and is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. As with most pictures of this type this is a […]
Introduction One of the big development in astronomy in recent years is the growth in what are called “smart telescopes”. Essentially these are packages that combine a telescope, a camera and a computer which simplifies the process of astrophotography. They normally come with an associated smart phone or tablet app that provides the user interface. […]