Starmus Festival astrophotography winner Alex Cherney got yesterday’s APOD with his prize-winning Starmus entry – a time-lapse video taken from the south Australian coast.

One of the most impressive pieces of night-sky time-lapse work I have seen, Alex won a trip to Tenerife and a full 1-hour of imaging time on the biggest telescope on the planet – the GTC on La Palma.

Ride the wave Alex 🙂

Gave a talk on “The Magic of Photography” yesterday to the Rhinefield Probus Group.  Nice turn out and some very good questions!

You will see a new Page Heading above, namely APODS/EPODS where I have listed all the APODS/EPODS published since I started submitting images in 2007.

An extremely interesting APOD today – and I wonder if this means that we are unlikely to find complex life-forms near Galactic centres.  Indeed – could this go some way to explain why the Ape descendants appeared in the quiet outer arms of the Milky Way 🙂

Managed to get today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day [APOD] with the wide field (sparkly colour) image of Kemble’s Cascade.  I like this image so much it is one of the permanent “wallpapers” on my home computer.  The little open cluster sitting on the left hand edge of the cascade makes this image perfect IMO 🙂

Noel has just told me that he did a lot of his StarSpikes Pro development work using this image of Kemble’s Cascade as a “test piece”.  I think it certainly paid off.  If you are into processing astronomical images and want full control over the software-based spikes and where they go – take a look at Noel’s StarSpikes Pro software – great value for money!

Yesterday, following publication of our Gamma Cass and friends image on Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) – the New Forest Observatory (NFO) site got 4,341 visits!!  Usual daily visit rate is around 150.  Such is the power of APOD 🙂

And to follow on from yesterday’s EPOD, Noel & I managed to get today’s APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day).  This time it’s the Gamma Cassiopeia nebulosity and Gamma Cas itself in a wide field image taken using the C11/Hyperstar III/SXVF-M25C combination.  A rather nice Christmas Eve present for 2009 – thank you Rob & Jerry 🙂

We’re on a roll!!  The Parker/Carboni double-team have just got the Astronomy Picture of the Day for 23rd December 2008 with our Coathanger cluster image 🙂  This one is a personal favourite of mine and was my desktop for many months.  Look down the postings and you will see our last APOD was just five days ago – so although 2008 has been very lean on APODs for us – we seem to be leaving the year on a high.

Great news for Greg & Noel – our image of La Superba has made it onto the  APOD [Astronomy Picture of the Day] site for December 18th 2008!!!!!!  This image was taken over 2 evenings using the Sky 90/SXVF-M25C combo, and the picture is square because I changed from portrait mode to landscape mode between the two imaging sessions.

I have always been fascinated by La Superba and when I saw it was as red on the monitor as described in the literature – it became an even more awe-inspiring object!

Today, Astronomy Picture of the Day [APOD] have published one of our most recent images, that of Messier 67 (M67) in the constellation Cancer.

Gathered at the center of this sharp skyview are the stars of Messier 67, one of the oldest known open star clusters. In fact, though open star clusters are usually much younger, the stars of M67 are likely around 4 billion years old, about the same age and with about the same elemental abundances as the Sun. Read the rest of this entry »

It took over a year of posting images before it finally happened!  Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD) have chosen our picture of the nebulosity around the supergiant star Gamma Cygni as picture of the day – today! Read the rest of this entry »