I imaged this huge emission nebula, the Rosette nebula or NGC 2244 - a skull in space that sits around 5200 light years away but still within our Milkyway galaxy. I imaged it using my dedicated OSC (one shot colour) astronomy camera, my HEQ5Pro equatorial mount and my Skywatcher 200P telescope. Total Integration time : 6 hours 75 mins Moon coverage : 25% Location : Monoceros Region of our night sky Bortle : 4 The Rosette Nebula is a huge star-forming region spanning 100 light years across and located 5,000 lightyears away from us. It can be seen in the Monoceros constellation in the winter months, located between stars Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion and Procyon in Canis Minor. Some people think, me included, that this star forming region of space looks like a skull and I definitely think so too. This time I decided to go for a sligthly more vibrant version of Rosette nebula and bring out some of the colours you might not see processed into this particular deep sky object. This time I was also able to image and process a vey special object called a Herbig-Haro object. Meaburn and Walsh reported in 1986 that an ionised trail in the Rosette Nebula has a velocity contour that shows a dramatic tilt. A 2010 study suggested that the Rosette Nebula contains an HH jet with a source 30′′ NW of the jet. I have highlighted this object in my zoomed in image below. It clealry show the ionised tail behind the star. HH objects are bright patches of gas that form when a newborn star ejects jets of gas that collide with nearby gas and dust clouds. They are transient and usually last for a few tens of thousands of years. HH objects are often found in star-forming regions and can be aligned with a star's rotational axis. The brightest HH objects are usually found at the ends of the jet, where the material collides with the surrounding molecular cloud. Sources:Wikipedia/NASA I hope you enjoy finding out more about the Rosette nebula and Herbig-Haro objects.

The aurora borealis in Scotland. You must be kidding right?! Nope Total Integration time : 10 second exposure Moon coverage : 0% Location : Northern Hemisphere Bortle : 4 As a kid, I always wanted to see the northern lights, but always thought I would never get a chance. I even thought I would need to travel further north to Iceland or Norway to see tan aurora, but how wrong was I! I spoke to some people who said this was the strongest geomagnetic storm for we had seen for such a long time. The Northern Lights from my back garden on the west coast of Scotland On October 10, 2024, a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun caused a severe geomagnetic storm that led to the aurora borealis being visible across the UK and North America, and most of Scotland, if you weren't clouded out that is, and we were treated to what I can only describe as, the most soul cleansing thing I have ever seen! So what causes these dancing displays of reds and greens and blues and purples? A large flare and filament combination left the sun in October, and the CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) arrived at Earth in the 10th and 11th October and stayed for a few days or so after this fantastic visual treat. I had clouds after this one and didn't manage to see the Aurora that happened a few months before this one. Most people who are into space stuff use lots of space apps to help them plan or image things in space, ISS transit monitor, Aurora watch apps, weather apps such as Clear Outside and lunar calculators etc. These can help with planning imaging sessions or events, but as this was aurora event was pretty widely spoken about in the news, I didn't need an app to tell me the aurora was above my head. It was so strong, I could actually feel it and see it all around me. Yeah, I know that sounds really weird that I could feel it around me, but I seriosly feal that I was being engulfed by the aurora. This was my viewpoint looking towards zenith, the uppermost and highest part of the night sky and from about 11.30pm on the 11th October 2024, I stood outside in my garden just watching for about two hours and took the odd snap in between. I swear I could hear sounds too, but that was probably my mind playing tricks on me. Or maybe I can hear colour! LOL Some of the images you see in the gallery above were ever so slightly tweaked and the saturation was increased, but this is pretty close to what I saw with my own eyes from my back garden. I really hope you get a chance to see a display like this at least once in your life; it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I hope you see it in Scotland in your back garden.

IC410 / NGC 1893 or the Tadpoles nebula is a cosmic collection of dust hurling through space and it looks like two tadpoles swimming! Can you see it? Total Integration time : 16 hours 40 mins Moon coverage : 25% Location : Northern Hemisphere Bortle : 4 This nebula is actually combined data from two different focal lengths of telescope, one at 1000mm and one at 750mm with the addition of the Starizona .75 reducer attached to the ZWO 533MMPro astronomy camera. The Tadploes nebula taken from my back garden. The Tadpoles nebula is located 12,000 lightyears from Earth in the Auriga constellation, and is nicknamed the Tadpole Nebula because of the tadpole-shaped ionised interstellar clouds of dust that appear to be swimming towards the centre of the nebula. The Tadpole Nebula is a region of ionised hydrogen gas spanning over 100 lightyears across that's carved and sculpted by streams of charged particles called stellar winds emanating from open star cluster NGC 1893. These pillars of dust and gas are huge! Really huge. They are estimated to be at least 10 light years in length; a light year being 9.4 trillion kilometers in disance. It would take 730 million earths laid side-by-side to span this distance. I am pretty sure that anytime amateur astronomers and astrophotographers look at this stuff it blows their minds, it certainly does me!

In 2022, I had an idea. Actually, I have several ideas on a regular basis, but that's for another day. I had been using social media for a few years to share my astronomy and astrophotography journey, and I always heard and seen people saying the same thing about regular social media platforms like Instagram etc — how much they were annoyed with such platforms, because their hard fought photons were being crushed by compression methods and these platforms only cared about serving ads to sell us stuff. Everyday was, and is, a constant battle with adverts, fake accounts, bots and spammy stuff. All we want to do is admire and share our amazing images of space with people who only want to see amazing images of space. And, more recently, it has started to get progressively worse, with the explosion of AI being used to generate fake images of deep sky objects pretending to be real. AI images most definitely are not real space images. Of course, one problem being that the average person who isn't used to seeing real images of space, thinks that these AI generated images are real. So, I decided that maybe it was time to create a dedicated app for sharing astrophotography images for iOS and Android, that allowed people like me to share their images, distraction free, wrapped up in a beautifully simple and user friendly user experience and in the original size and resolution that those images were saved in. So, as a community, we could share and learn from each other in a safe place for sharing space images and 'stuff'. Hence, Picastro - social media for astro. Sure, there are a few other places available to post astronomical photographic images, but none of these were focused on a beautifully simple, easy to use dedicated app only for astro. Don't get me wrong, I use some of these other platforms too, but those other platforms were not hugely mobile friendly and they certainly didn't have a dedicated app available to me that allowed me to share only astronomy and astrophotography images in a social media environment, especially when I had just started out. They felt too complex and overpowering. For someone like me at the start of my journey of taking space images, I need a simple, easy to use place to share my journey, and it didn't exist... until now. So, in 2022, I set about planning and designing a dedicated app for space images and content — to give all of us astronerds a place to share our own journey to the cosmos and beyond, no matter what stage of our cosmic adventure. I started in stealth mode, planned and designed some prototypes, tested the UX and UI with a group of users who would be using it the most, and it was overwhelmingly received with open arms and positivity. What a relief that was! I made the decision to start on the road to building this dedicated app for spacenerds and bring it to everyone. It was a tough task, that's for sure. Lots of learning and lots of mistakes. By 2024 I had a small team in place and we were working to make this the best space app possible. By September 2024 it was ready for launch, fully bug tested, alpha and beta tested and raring to go! Thanks goes out to all the beta testers who put the app through its paces. I have learned so much during this process and I am looking forward to the future of this app, to make it the best and most innovative app it can be for the astro community. Thank you all for your unwavering support over the last couple of years. Thanks for reading this. Typos now fixed! ;-) T

I imaged this galaxy from my back garden in 2023 using my one shot colour camera and my LExtreme light pollution pollution filter. It is M51a and 51b. My image also appeared on BBC Sky at Night magazine's Instagram page. Total Integration time : 6hours 35 min Moon coverage : 50% Location : Northern Hemisphere Bortle : 4 The Whirlpool galaxy or Messier 51a : The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a or NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. It is 7.22 megaparsecs away and 23.58 kiloparsecs in diameter. Source Wikipedia This was actually a failry tricky target to process to be fair. I used my telescope and astonomy camera to image this wonderful example of this galaxy. The faint gray 'stuff' you see around this galaxy is what is called IFN or integrated flux nebula and is light being reflected from the surrounding galaxy and the Milkyway. M51 was discovered by Charles Messier in 1773. M51 is located 31 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. It has an apparent magnitude of 8.4 and can be spotted with a small telescope most easily during May. The Whirlpool Galaxy’s beautiful face-on view and closeness to Earth allow amateur astronomers to study a classic spiral galaxy’s structure and star-forming processes. This was maybe the fifth Messier object I imaged in the summer months of 2023, I think I managed to get around Messier 10 objects that time. The summer nights were particularly warm with ambient temps around 15 or 16 deg which is actually pretty warm for Scotland, but I soldiered on non-the-less, with my cooled astronomy camera, to try and get more objects from the messier catalogue, of whcih there are 110. See here for the full list. I hope you enjoy seeing these images.