Narrowband filters are an invaluable tool in astrophotography, and a pretty neat piece of modern engineering themselves. Using hundreds of layers of dielectric coatings deposited via a cloud of plasma in a vacuum chamber, these nanome...

The solar activity cycle is an 11 year cycle of increased and decreased activity from the sun caused by the reversal of the sun's magnetic field in the maximum of each cycle. Solar activity in a maximum period is associated with more ...

Dark skies are one of the most important things for visual astronomers and astrophotographers alike. Light pollution adds a bright haze in front of anything in the night sky, obscuring faint objects completely. And while worse light p...

Seeing a total solar eclipse with your own eyes is something everybody needs to do at least once in their life if they're at all able. Seeing day change into night in seconds, seeing the planets and the stars in mid-afternoon, seeing ...

Pickering's Triangle was first discovered by Williamina Fleming in 1904 by examining photographic plates from the Harvard Observatory where she worked, under the observatory director Edward Charles Pickering. Williamina had many of he...

Today's image is of the Omega Nebula, sometimes called the Swan Nebula, or by its Messier catalogue number M17. It's actually considered to be one of the brightest, most massive star forming regions in our ...

The Cygnus Wall region in the North America Nebula features a great range of colours and wavelengths, making it a common and effective yardstick for comparing different filters and processing techniques. Askar's new Colour Magi...