How far have I progressed from my first image?

The image of the Orion nebula shown above was the start of my interest in astrophotography. It was taken using the Open University telescope in Teneriffe as part of an Open Learning course. At the time I was building a Pikon telescope that used a ventilation tube as the OTA, a raspberry Pi camera instead of an eyepiece and I was 3D printing the rest of the components. The course was to help improve my knowledge of astronomy.

At that time, Noverber 2020, I was blown away with the image and thought – could I get anything as good using my own telescope in my own back garden.

Over the next year I had progressed from the Pikon an was using a Skywatcher Travelstar 102 refractor for wide angle images with my Nikon D7000 for imaging.

One year later in November 2021 This is what I had achied. I was pleased with the fact that it was recognisable as Orion and that it was taken from my back garden, but there was a lot of room for improvement.

Now we move on a further 12 months to December 2022. By then I had realised the limitations of the equipment I was using and had progressed to a William Oprics Zenithstar 73 as my wide angle refractor telescope and was using a Altair 183C camera. I am really pleased with this image.