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While in secondary school, my friend John Caffrey and I entered and won the Senior category of the 'Irish Young Astronomers of the Year' competition back in 1991, as part of the 200th Anniversary celebrations for the Armagh Observatory. This was a one-off national competition to observe Jupiter's four Galilean moons over a two month period. From here, we had to plot their orbits and prove Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion.As part of the prizes, there was a ceremony at the Armagh Observatory, and a trip to Jodrell Bank in Manchester, one of the world's largest radio telescopes.Fast forward to 2017, and John had...

I'll be exhibiting at the Galway Astronomy Festival on Saturday the 28th of January 2017, at the Westwood Hotel in Galway. More details to come in the coming week or two - stay tuned! :)

Website: https://eapod.euFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/EuropeanAPOD/I'm excited to announce that a new EAPOD website has been created to promote Astrophotography and Astronomy in Europe, and to showcase the efforts of European Astrophotographers.I was honoured to be asked to be a judge on the team.As one of the ten judges, I review images on the Flickr page, and put forward my own suggestions on images that I think would be good to publish on the site. If the other judges approve of the suggestion, the image gets published (provided the photographer has given the go ahead to do so), together with a detailed write-up about the...

I was honoured to have been asked to write the monthly "Image Processing" article in this month's BBC "Sky At Night" magazine for December 2016, where I give details on how I stitched the Orion Mega mosaic! Here's a sneak preview of my article... You can find more info on the contents of the Dec 2016 issue by clicking here! Interested in a digital subscription to the 'Sky at Night' magazine?I see that you can now subscribe to digital editions of the magazine which is very cool for reading on iPads, etc. More info can be found here.

I had a very successful trip to Iceland to photograph the Aurora Borealis!After staying an extra two nights, I weathered a snow blizzard to get to Pingvellir Park, a dark location in one of Iceland's National Parks. While it was mostly cloudy that night, the aurora could be seen through clouds, all night!During a ten minute gap in the clouds, I set up the camera to take still images for a video I captured, which I've posted on my Flickr site here and also below :- You can see what I call the "Christmas Tree Nebula" below (which is also up on...