Welcome to the Patrick Moore Collection

The Patrick Moore Collection is a collection of images scanned from photographic slides. These slides cover Patrick's entire career in astronomy, and include pictures from sources such as NASA as well as those taken by Patrick himself. The Collection is available to view online for free, and may be used for personal or academic purposes. If you wish to use slides for commercial purposes (for example, in a book or paid lecture), please contact us. The images that you see here and in the Gallery are low resolution copies; the original slides were scanned at high resolution using a professional scanner to achieve top quality results. If you require images for printing or publication, these high-resolution originals can be provided.

The complete Collection contains many thousands of slides. We have currently scanned and indexed 7493 of these, and we are still working on the rest. Once scanned, each slide requires titling, and this is a huge manual effort. We require volunteer editors to add titles and descriptions to all the slides so that they can be usefully indexed and searched. The original index was typewritten by Patrick, and we need people to enter these titles for each slide online. If you wish to help, please contact us.

Illustrations are always useful. They are invaluable for lecturers, for authors and for pure enjoyment. Astronomical pictures can be beautiful - who has not been fascinated by a first view of the Orion Nebula, or the glorious icy rings of Saturn? But it is not always obvious where these pictures can be obtained. We hope that the Collection will help.

What we have tried to do is to put together a selection which includes "something for everybody". There are images of the Moon, the planets, stars, galaxies and all other features of the universe, and there are also pictures of telescopes and equipment from all parts of the world - from the far north to the far south. Finally, there are pictures of many great astronomers. It so happens that I took a good number of these, and I have been around a long time, but on my travels I usually had my trusty Nikon with me. And after all, I must be one of the few people who knew the first airman (Orville Wright), the first space-man (Yuri Gagarin) and the first men on the Moon (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin), plus Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Wernher von Braun...

Well, our Collection is here. We hope that you will find it helpful, and that you will make use of it. No doubt it can be improved; if you have any comments or suggestions, do let us have them. Remember, too, that we hold regular meetings, and that the Society is always glad to see you and help In any way we can. Astronomy is open to all, and there are no age restrictions. To take an active interest, you may be in your pre-teens - or you may be as ancient as me. Look through this Collection, and I am sure that you will see what I mean.

Here's to clear skies for us all!

Patrick Moore