Scorpius rising

I took this image on the 5th of June while on holiday in Majorca with a camera and mini-tripod balancing on a rubbish bin. Looking east it shows Scorpius rising over the villas on the cliff tops and also the faint glow of the galactic centre in the lower left quadrant. This is an area of sky rich with Messier objects, see how many you can spot, I'm up to 14 so far!

Canon EOS550d, focal length of 29mm at f3.5, ISO800, 20 second exposure.

M17 - The Swan

It's upside-down here so looks more like a swan than in the sky, where it can be seen visually, with a big enough telescope, as a fairly bright and recognisable shape. It was taken with an M25C and Vixen VMC260L with a Meade 6.3 focal reducer in the optical train to widen the field of view.
Taken on the 16th of June this year, this object is very low in the south so fraught with light pollution and thick air introducing diffraction problems etc. But shortening the focal length eases many difficulties, as does an IDAS LPS filter.
The exposure was 7x300sec, 25 dome flats were taken too, but no darks, and it was processed in AstroArt and Photoshop CS2.

Vesta

This is an animated gif file, made of two frames taken in March this year, without a telescope, naked DSLR? It's of the dwarf planet Vesta, as it was passing through Leo.
If you click on the picture you'll get a larger one and be able to see the animation.