Keith Cooper

Hi Olly, I don't think that's accurate. Magazines are printed at 300dpi, which is usually much higher than standard computer screen resolution. Though it's not really much of a problem these days as the image files submitted to us are usually large enough. If you're not sure, check in the settings on the software you're using, how large, in cm/inches, your image will appear at 300dpi. This is why, going back even 10 years ago, many images were presented small in the magazine, because at 300dpi they would not have been that large, and printing them larger would see them lose detail and become a little pixelated. With today's larger format cameras it's a different story, most images submitted are large enough and we do print quite a few images in the gallery at half-page or full page size, or even as double-page spreads (in response to someone who mentioned one of the reasons they stopped buying mags is because images were presented small in magazines). Another thing to be aware of is that magazines print in CYMK, whereas computer screens display RGB. This can sometimes result in some colours looking a little off when printed as they don't seem to always translate exactly from RGB to CYMK. Also, we find that images sometimes print darker than they appear on the screen, so it might be worth just brightening your images a tad if you want to avoid them looking too dark when printed. If we were publishing a book, we'd get proofs back and be able to identify which pages are too dark and get them fixed, but unfortunately on magazines we don't get that luxury.

It's been interesting reading this – and I do hear you when you say it's harder for beginners or those with less expensive kit to compete with someone using a 20-inch robotic telescope in Spain or somewhere. I understand that. There's no real magic formula to how we chose the images each month. We just collect them all together and choose which ones we like the most! The choices are made irrespective of where or how they've been taken, really we're just looking for aesthetic and technical qualities. That said, we do try to get good variety each month so that they're not all deep-sky images, but that there are some of the Moon, or star trails, or the planets etc included too. So we might leave out some cracking deep-sky images in favour of a decent shot of the Moon, for example. I think that's an important point to make – a starscape with a church spire or natural feature in the foreground taken with a DSLR stands just as much chance of being featured in the gallery as a 14-hour exposure of a DSO. The November issue featured an image of the crescent Moon taken with a 114EQ and a Nokia phone from the middle of Birmingham, for example, so it's not all about having the most expensive kit or the maddest processing skills. We do sometimes feature some images taken outside of the UK, this is partly because of the growth in using robotic telescopes, but we also have an international readership. Certainly, with the way the weather has been this autumn, I expect we'll receive fewer images than usual over the next few months because of the seemingly endless cloudy nights, and we might skew a little more towards those images taken in Spain or the USA or elsewhere in forthcoming issues because of that. We often find that it's the same small number of imagers that submit images to us, so they inevitably end up in the gallery because we don't always receive images from other people! All I can say is, submit your images! I can't promise that they'll definitely be included in the gallery, but we do like to see them regardless. I always suggest targeting objects a little off the beaten track – we're going to be deluged with images of M42 this winter, but we'll only publish one or two of them, but if you image something a little less obvious then it might stand a better chance by virtue of us looking for variety. It's always cool when we receive an image of an object that we've not seen in the gallery before. Anyway, I hope that provides a little bit of context, and good luck with your imaging! Keith Cooper, Astronomy Now