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Following last Summer's trip to Les Granges in France, I finally got around to processing the first image I took on the imaging holiday.M22 is a Globular Cluster in Sagittarius approximately the same size as the Moon. At 10,000 light years from Earth, this is the brightest Globular visible from Mid and Northern Europe. Accompanying M22 is the much smaller globular cluster NGC 6642 in the top right corner.This image was taken in August 2017 with a TEC140 refractor, Atik 11000 CCD camera, and is 7 hours of LRGB images.

Over the Winter period, Olly was capturing data in the TEC140. I had suggested that we go for IC447 and NGC2170.Both objects contain Reflection and Dark nebulae, with NGC2170 also having some Emission nebula.I had captured both nebulae from Spain, and so myself and Olly decided to combine our RGB data, and mix it with the higher resolution TEC data.IC447 has 20hrs of data, while NGC2170 comes in with just over 27hrs of data. IC447 NGC2170 Both of these images are available to purchase from my Online Store. 

I had my first publication in the US Edition of Sky and Telescope magazine, where they published my 400-hour Orion Mosaic in the March 2017 edition This was followed up again in June's Edition, with a full-page devoted to a central crop of the Galactic Centre mosaic.

I was asked to join the Astro Pixel Processing team as a Beta tester for the Astro Pixel Processor product. This will be a new Astrophotography Processing software package, and it has some great features.I have been mainly testing the Mosaic capabilities, and so far it has been very good at registering and stitching the 25 panes of Luminance for my third project of Cassiopeia.The result was almost flawless with only some small mis-shapen stars in one small region. The success of the software is that I can stitch the mosaic in Linear format. This will allow me perform many other steps...

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...