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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...

While imaging the Cassiopeia mosaic, myself and Olly found a Ha signal below the Gamma Cass IC 59 and IC63 nebulae. We thought this was worth some further investigation!As a result, we ended up collecting 51 hours of data in a two panel mosaic with the Dual Tak set up. We took 24 hours of Ha data over the two panels, which showed a weak single continuing from the IC nebulae around Gamma Cass.After processing the image, the nebula appeared to be of the same structure. Olly coined the name Breaking Wave, which I hope sticks. We have not seen this...

Tom O’DonoghueTom O’DonoghueAfter another successful imaging trip to Les Granges France, the base Luminance layer for the next Mega Mosaic has been captured! I managed to image 100 hours of Luminance on a 5x5 mosaic format. The picture above has been constructed to show how all the 25 panes match up. I use this layer to register all frames to, before the blending process begins. I'll continue to report on progress here so stay tuned for further updates! :)

  The highly successful Images Of Starlight exhibition which is currently running in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast up to the 30th of September 2016, will then move to Trinity College Dublin for Science Week.The images from Ireland's Astrophotographers, will be on display in the Fitzgerald Building (Physics Building) from the 5th to the 14th of October 2016.More info can be found on the Spaceweek website here.

Last Thursday (Sept 15th), I attended the awards ceremony for the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016 competition in the beautiful Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The standard of images this year was incredible, with over 4500 entries from 80 countries!I was lucky enough to be shortlisted again this year, this time for my "Starlight and Silhouettes" image in the "Stars and Nebulae" category, and I was thrilled to receive a "Highly Commended" (3rd Place) award in my category! Huge congratulations to Yu Jun for his stunning "Baily's Beads" image - definitely a worthy winner!It was wonderful to meet up with the...