Photographs captured & processed by Pete Lawrence; an amateur astronomer based in Lisburn, Northern Ireland.

Primary equipment includes an 8" Newtonian Telescope, NEQ6 Pro mount, a cooled CCD camera & a DSLR camera. Image data was captured using BackyardNikon, Backyard EOS or Sequence Generator Pro & processed using PixInSight. Most of these photographs were taken from his back garden, not far from the centre of Lisburn. His childhood interest in astrophotography was revived in 2015 and, with the support of  family & the community of users on the StarGazersLounge forum, he hopes to develop the skills to eventually produce world class photographs. This website will contain all of his final images to create a record of his journey through the fascinating world of astrophotography. If you have any questions, comments or you would like a copy of any of his photographs; please use the contact link at the top of the page to get in touch with Pete directly.

"One of my recent realisations is that every star we can see in the sky; all of the millions, or rather billions of them, are all inside our own galaxy, The Milky Way. Each of the countless other galaxies throughout our universe contains the same quantity of, and often more, stars of their own.

Thinking of light's seemingly infinite speed on Earth; the light from our Sun takes just 8 minutes to travel the 91 million miles to us, yet takes more than 4 years to get to us from the nearest other star, Alpha Centauri A. The light from the closest galaxy to us, the Andromeda galaxy, takes around 2,500,000 years to reach us. When we gaze out into the 'darkness', we are not simply looking at objects a large distance from us; we are actually looking back in time.

To me; the scale of our Galaxy, our Universe, is truly incomprehensible." Pete Lawrence, 2017.