About

Old Photons is my astrophotography gallery. Most of the deep-sky work is shot from a back garden in Barnsley, which is not a dark site, so a good deal of the craft happens in the data rather than the moment.

The kit spans a few rigs. At home, a Sky-Watcher Esprit 120 ED rides a belt-driven NEQ6/EQ6-R for high-resolution deep sky, with an ASI2600MC for colour or an ASI1600MM for mono LRGB and narrowband, all run from NINA. The travel rig is a William Optics RedCat 71 on a ZWO AM5 harmonic mount, driven by StellarMate. A ZenithStar 71 is the outreach scope, and the one I take to Solar Sundays, paired with the AM5 and the solar set: Herschel wedges for white light and Calcium-K, plus DayStar Quark etalons for the magnesium and sodium lines. A ZWO Seestar S50 is the family-holiday grab-and-go.

The gallery is organised by what each object actually is, and every entry notes how old its photons are when they reach the sensor: from about 1.3 seconds for the Moon and eight minutes for the Sun, out to tens of millions of years for distant galaxies.

More of my writing, covering homelab, storage, security, hardware and the occasional travel piece, lives at qsplace.co.uk.