Having attended the excellent BAA Deep Sky Section meeting today, I came away determined / inspired to have a bit of a go at taking some photographs of the sky. I've never really been into the idea too much, and largely assumed it was all a bit too expensive / tricky to be bothered with. But the talks today made me think I should have a go.

As luck would have it, clear skies greeted me when I got home, so I grabbed my old Canon 400D, a little tripod, and set about fairly randomly shooting the sky. 15 second exposures. I then tried a trick I'd heard about today - using standard image processing software, I blurred the images to remove the stars, then subtracted this image from the original to eliminate light pollution.

I have to say, for a first go, I'm pretty pleased! Managed to get Jupiter in Taurus, and also Cassiopeia. The Pleiades show up nicely in the first, and if you look closely you can see the Andromeda Galaxy in the second.

Suspect this might be the thin end of the wedge....!