We went out again last week, here is another attempt at Jupiter, it is getting better, although you can see the camera pixels on this one but we have two moons too, definite progress. By the way, it’s really easy to see Jupiter’s moons and when we took the picture the great red spot was on the other side. We took more than 15,000 exposures thanks to a comment posted on this blog and it worked, thanks for that!
Next I’ll show you the prettiest colour picture I’ve managed to make so far of the Orion Nebula using different filters. It isn’t great but I’ve spent hours trying to do different things and this is the best I’ve come up with in terms of aesthetics so far.
So thanks to all for following the blog in 2014 and I hope you have a good holiday!
Dark London Skies 
Looks much better, congrats! As for M42, might be better to try a picture just off the main trapezium group until you get a focal reducer to prevent them washing out the rest of the image. Have you taken any darks or flats yet? What exposures are you using? Try a big stack of short exposures even if the individual frames don’t show much obvious nebulosity. My best of M42 was a stack of about 100 2-minute exposures although obviously with an 8″ rather than 14″ SCT. That took a while though…
Maybe try a different deep sky object. For resolution testing (which looks pretty relevant in the above image of M42) try M13. Can quickly get loads of short exposures with that too.
These are awesome! If you haven’t already, you should check out http://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography – huge community of astrophotographers with lots of helpful advice and whatnot 🙂