New Forest Observatory ®

This week we go back to an astroimage. A very widefield of one of my favourite starfield regions – the Caph region of Cassiopeia. This image also captures my favourite open-cluster NGC7789, I call this the open cluster that thinks it’s a globular. The cluster also contains an amazing variable star with huge variability.

This week we feature a High-Speed image of a pair of eggs being shot by an air rifle. You can just see the pellet to the far left of the image frozen in flight. I was inspired to take this image by Stephen Dalton, High-Speed Flash photography guru, who put an exploding egg picture on the front cover of his book – Split Second: The World of High-Speed Photography. I sent my image to Stephen who was extremely gracious in saying that it was better than his shot. Well I guess it should be really as Stephen was doing this work decades before me!

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!!!