New Forest Observatory ®

This week we show a micrograph of a Dragonfly eye. But it takes quite a bit of work to put an image like this together. The image is captured using a Canon 5D MkII DSLR camera attached to a research trinocular microscope at a magnification of x20. BUT – the whole eye is too big for a single frame so this is in fact a mosaic of 2 frames. But there’s even more that needs to be done. The huge depth of focus is achieved by taking a focus-stacked image and then applying the brilliant Helicon Focus software to create what almost looks like an SEM image (due to the huge depth of focus). So both frames are individually focus-stacked and then they are combined in Adobe Photoshop to give the final image you see here.

This week’s picture of the week is a macrophoto of the “Eye” region on the underside of an Owl Butterfly’s wing. The image was captured using a Canon 5D MkII DSLR and a Canon 100mm macro-lens.

This week we feature a Lunar Halo captured one cold evening at the New Forest Observatory, with Jupiter making a cameo appearance.

Pictures of the Week beginning January 4th 2026 will include ALL images captured at the New Forest Observatory – not just astronomy images.

In this image we have a pair of Buzzards soaring over the New Forest Observatory in a thermal they’ve picked up on this lovely sunny morning.

Happy New Year to you all and I hope you get at least a few cloudless, Moonless nights to continue the hobby.

For the Christmas week we feature my favourite Christmas period star. The mighty Sirius!!!

For the Christmas week we feature my favourite Christmas star. The mighty Sirius!!

This week we feature a large galaxy cluster that can be found near Arcturus. All the faint brown fuzzies that can be seen in the centre of this image are all galaxies. A star is tagged so that you can orient this image on a planetarium program. This is 3-hours of 10-minute subs taken on the Sky90 array.

This week we feature the IC410/405 region of Auriga with an image captured using the 200mm Canon prime lenses together with the Optolong filters and the ASI 2600 MC Pro CMOS cameras.