Spoutwood Space Gallery

Welcome

Welcome to the Spoutwood Farm Observatory's gallery of astrophotography.  Clicking on any of the thumbnails below will open a slideshow in a separate window.  Hovering your mouse at the top of the slideshow will allow you to control the speed of playback or pause the slideshow.  Hovering your mouse at the bottom will allow you to view the images individually.  Clicking on an image as it is being displayed will show the image details or launch the image in a new window. Enjoy!

Astrophotography

All of our images are captured with our 8" achromatic refracting telescope and a Celestron NexImage CCD camera. A CCD (stands for Charge-Coupled Device) camera acts in much the same way as a common digital video camera.  However CCD astrophotography requires the astronmer to process video frame by frame, selecting and aligning the best ones.  Advanced processing software then stacks the images into a single composite image; the result is a picture vastly superior to the original video.  Advances in digital video hardware and computer processing speeds have allowed what was once an expensive, high-end technology available only to professional astronomers to be today available to everyone.

Interested in learning how to do astrophotography? The Spoutwood Farm Observatory hosts several astronomy seminars throughout the year, please see our 'Schedule' tab for more information about our four Open Houses and our booth during the May Day Fairie Festival and the Mother Earth Harvest Fair. 

Contents

Best of the Month

A collection of our best images, updated at the middle and end of every month.

Jupiter

Over 20 images of the Solar System's largest planet, in natural color as well as in red light, including pictures of the four moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. 

Io's Shadow - click here to see a time-lapse series of photos showing the shadow of Jupiter's nearest moon, Io, traversing the image of the planet!

Mars

See the North Polar Ice Cap and other surface detail!

Saturn

The ringed giant and Father of Jupiter.

The Moon

Close-ups of our nearest neighbor.

Venus

A growing collection showing the slow change of phases first seen by Galileo.

The Sun

Uranus

Neptune