I got hooked on Astronomy in 2001, which four years later resulted in the building of my own permanent observatory – the DBO – in 2005. After an initial burst of activity resulting in a couple of dozen images, there seemed to be a period of a couple of years where the observatory was permanently covered in cloud. So much in fact that, I lost all interest in taking astronomical images, for something more terrestrial and creative.

A trip to the annual Winchester weekend organised by the British Astronomical Association, has reignited my enthusiasm again. I also have opportunity to rebuild the observatory at a new dark field site, well away from the light pollution from the ‘Big Smoke’ of Truro. While lousy cloud cover could still thwart deep sky photography, I hope there are enough breaks in the cloud to do some Lunar Observing and webcam imaging of its features.

To kick off the imaging side, the image above is Sunspot 1193 taken through my TMB 80mm Refractor. I took four x 2000 frame webcam video files, which were processed in Registax 6 and combined in Photoshop CS5. Further image details can be found in the Solar section of my website.