Amateur star-spotter's spellbinding images of space

Captured in all their astonishing beauty, these pictures show that the farthest reaches of space are filled with a dazzling light show.

The glorious colours of our cosmos, the swirling spirals of the great galaxies, the wispy filaments of giant gas and dust clouds called nebulae...surely these pictures must be the result of gargantuan machines like the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits Earth, or perhaps one of the giant observatories atop mountains in Chile and Hawaii.



Not so. In fact, these beautiful, often surreal, images come courtesy of an amateur photographer based in a shed in his New Forest back garden who has spent less than £10,000 on his equipment.

Greg Parker, a professor of electronics at Southampton University, has spent thousands of hours studying space from a portable observatory, and photographing the wonders he can see.

There are more photos here.