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.