As you flick through the pages of Astronomy Now, your gaze will inevitably fall upon the many beautiful images of the cosmos. Some have been taken by professional observatories and space telescopes, but don't those taken by amateurs match up well? In this month's Focus we have expert astro-imagers Grant Privett, Nick Howes and Robin Scagell to guide you through the wonderful, but sometimes confusing, world of digital SLRs, Charged-Couple Devices (CCDs) and webcams.

Elsewhere, Nick Howes reports on his visit to the Palomar Observatory, sixty years after the telescopes saw first light and Nik Szymanek offers his advice on imaging globular clusters. Keith Cooper looks at what the upcoming Saturn equinox has to offer in the way of new discoveries, and Kulvinder Singh Chadha discovers that Orion's red supergiant star Betelgeuse is shrinking.

In the shops we review the Sky-Watcher Skyliner-250PX FlexTube Auto Dobsonian; Martin Mobberley analyses the use of mirror cells in Tech Talk and in Gearheads, Jane Green relates the story of building her new observatory.

All that plus our usual news, reviews and society news, plus Jeremy Perez’s Drawn to the Universe and Carole Stott’s Starting from Scratch series, and your complete guide to the Night Sky for the month ahead.