This digest has two aims.
The first is to cover in depth, without being too technical, advances in our knowledge, equipment and techniques that I hope will be of interest to all amateur astronomers.
The second is to add to the content of the books recently published by Cambridge University Press and so keep them up fully up to date.
The author also writes a guide to each month’s northern hemisphere night sky. Just search for ‘Night Sky Jodrell’.
Recent Pages added to the Digest
Most recent: The Sony α7S (rather than the α7S II): could this be an astrophotographer’s dream camera?
Correcting bloated stars and using both raw and Jpeg data in creating an image of the Hyades and Pleiades clusters.
Removing Planes in Deep Sky Stacker: Orion imaged with a Fuji X100S.
Could Jpegs be better than raw for astroimaging?
What exposure to use for Astrophotography with a CMOS DSLR or mirrorless camera.
The Hyades and Pleiades Clusters imaged with a Sony Alpha 68 DSLR using 50mm and 90 mm prime lenses.
Cataracts – an astronomer’s story.
Imaging in Moonlight – the ‘Double Double’ and comet W2 (Africano).
The Northern Milky Way with Cygnus, Lyra, Aquilla and Delphinus.
Full Frame Cameras for Astroimaging.
A Colourfull Moon using ‘Super-resolution’.
The Samyang/Rokinon 12mm f/2.0 lens for astrophotography.
I would like to dedicate this website to Rod Mollise whose posts in ‘Uncle Rod’s Astro Blog’ have, for many years, been a source of great inspiration for me.
Ian Morison FRAS is an astronomer and
astrophysicist who served as the 35th Gresham Professor of Astronomy. Though a radio astronomer by profession, now in his 54th year at the Jodrell Bank Observatory of the University of Manchester, he has been a keen amateur optical astronomer since making his first simple telescope with lenses given to him by his optician when 11 or 12. In 1990 he helped found the Macclesfield Astronomy Society of which he is now patron and he is a past president of the UK’s Society for Popular Astronomy, now acting as its Instrument and Imaging Advisor. He writes a regular ‘Telescope Topics’ column for ‘Popular Astronomy’ and has made many contributions to the ‘Sky at Night’ and ‘Astronomy Now’ magazines.
His recent books published by Cambridge University Press are shown below and all can be purchased from Blackwell’s, just search for ‘Ian Morison’.
A book aimed to bridge the gap between books for beginners and the specialised books about individual practical astronomy topics.
A book based on the author’s Gresham lectures on Astronomy.
A book covering all aspects of Astrophotography.
[The opening image is of the galaxy M33 in Triangulum. It was taken remotely using an ASA 8-inch Newtonian Astrograph located in Spain. The data acquisition and image processing used to achieve this image are described both in ‘An Amateurs Guide…’ and ‘The Art of Astrophotography’.]