Close up of a space snowball

Stuart Hilliker captured these images in Angmering, West Sussex, UK, on 12 July 2020. “I used a William Optics Megrez 72 telescope, a Canon 700D camera and an AstroTrac camera mount,” said Hilliker.

Eight minutes worth of useful data was captured over a two-hour period. Various exposure times and ISOs were used, with the most successful being at 15 seconds with an ISO of 1,600. The images were processed and refined using DeepSkyStacker and later, Adobe Photoshop.