My book is now available in print through Amazon print on demand! This is not a technical “how to” book on astrophotography, but rather this is a book I wrote for my family and friends who simply appreciate the images they see and are mildly curious about how much work goes into taking these photographs. It’s my love letter to the night sky and a tour of the kinds of targets we shoot, the gear we use, and the lengths we will go to to find dark skies suitable for this kind of imaging. I hope some of you will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
How have I missed this gorgeous globular cluster? M55 is low to the South in the constellation Sagittarius from where I live, and capturing it was part of my recent surgical strike. My two favorite Northern Hemisphere globulars are M13 and Omega Centauri, and this one is every bit as beautiful. The core is not quite as dense, and you can easily resolve and bring out the amber and blue stars all the way through the core. Globular clusters are honestly low hanging fruit if you have a quality refractor. Nothing I own but one of my Esprit refractors will bring out the powdery nature of this star city. Also, short exposures are actually best! Short exposures will not saturate the star cores and it is far easier to preserve the star colors both in the cluster itself and in the surrounding sky. Only 70 minutes of two minute RGB exposures went into this image using an FLI Microline 16200 on an f/7 Esprit 150. Unguided of course on a Paramount MX+ 😉
How much longer will sights and images like this be possible? All over the world, astronomers, both amateur and professional alike seek out dark sites such as this dark sky camp shown here in Okeechobee Florida. Not only is it getting harder and harder to find areas far enough from city lights (and here, you can still see the sky glow from the city of Okeechobee), but inevitably the sky will be filled with satellites streaking through our images. The recent Space X launch has drawn a lot of interest to this, and bear in mind there are dozens of geosynchronous satellites already in this image that you can’t see. Make no mistake though, the drum of progress will demand that this number grows to thousands to tens of thousands in the coming years, and we need to be prudent and responsible about how we affect our environment, and this includes the night sky.
I just love globular clusters, both visually and photographically. Omega Centauri is the undisputed king of globulars and is only accessible from the Southern states. What’s really great about this image is that I took it at the 2011 Winter Star party in the Florida Keys. That’s 8 years ago! My original attempt at processing the data is a bit less than stellar<g>. However I kept the original calibrated and stacked data set and just spent a few minutes on it to bring out this beauty! You can read more about it over at The Accidental Astronomer.
Omega Centauri is a phenomenal globular cluster in the deep southern skies.
I’m a little late with this post, but I am no less thrilled than I was the very day, on March 8, 2019 when one of my images was selected as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). This years Winter Star Party (2019) was one of the best I’ve seen in 15 years weather wise. We had clear skies a good portion of every night, and I managed to capture close to 7 hours of data on this target over the course of four evenings using my favorite imaging combination, my Sky-Watcher Esprit 150 refractor and an FLI MicroLine 16200. I have a MoonLite NiteCrawler focuser/rotator upgrade for the OTA as well, and it’s just a rock solid and reliable combination. I could set my software to autofocus every time I changed filters, and I’d let it run for a couple of hours while I looked through friends visual telescopes and enjoyed a brownie or two from Mickie’s Kitchen.
Thursday night at the 2019 Winter Star Party, the thin crescent Moon presented a wonderful sight. Not only was the Earthshine quite prominent, but two peaks at the bottom limb were just poking up and out into the sunlight making little peaks of light below the crater Tycho. I had my 6″ Esprit 150 refractor setup with an FLI ML-16200 CCD camera, which is really best suited for long exposure astrophotography. So, I shot the lunar limb through an Ha filter, which attenuates the light nicely allowing for the slow shutter speed of a full frame CCD camera. Then for the Earthshine, I used a 10 second exposure through a red filter. This naturally saturated the bright side of the moon, but I blended the two images together in Photoshop to better match the dynamic range that was available to my eyes through binoculars or a neighboring telescope with an eyepiece.
This image had to be a composite as the Earthshine is so much dimmer than the Sun illuminated limb.
This year the Winter Star Party returned to the Florida Keys after having to relocate for a year due to the extensive damage wrought by Hurricane Irma. We could not have been treated better by the weather, and there’s going to be several additions to my gallery from this years photography and imaging. This is my favorite image from the trip, and I think possibly my favorite nightscape I’ve ever taken. I also won first place in the wide field imaging contest with this shot. Just before dawn, I knew the Summer Milky Way would be making an appearance and I wanted to catch it behind a row of telescopes setup for the star party. While scoping out (ha, see what I did there) locations, I saw two other people shooting possibly Venus and Jupiter being reflected in the water. I knew I had the perfect shot that captured the essence of the Winter Star Party! Two star gazers enjoying the view in tourist central (the Florida Keys). Truly, we are all here as cosmic tourists.
Richard
Canon 5D Mark III
10 seconds @ISO 3200
Sigma 20mm art lens f/1.4
Yes, I know this phrase is a media super hype, and actually I tweaked it just a little bit. Super Wolf… it’s a thing. Wolf Blood… it’s a thing too. Super Wolf Blood Moon, ahoooooo!
I was sick and should have stayed home and went to bed… but what fun is that?!? Astrophotography is a compulsion, and the muse must be obeyed. This image is four frames stacked, each taken in rapid succession right after midnight. Hey, it’s the witching hour super wolf blood… okay, whatever. The exposures were with a Canon 5D Mark III DSLR on a Sky-Watcher Esprit 150 refractor (f/7). They were taken at ISO 3200 with an exposure time of 1.5 seconds. I found on the Moon just like for night scapes, higher ISO’s actually do have lower noise for low light images as long as you get sufficient light to the sensor. I wrote more about it over here at Sky & Telescope. The shorter ISO 100 images  actually have significantly more noise.
Another side note, I posted this same image on Facebook and Instragram and they both destroyed the lower portion of the image! Apparently, the JPEG compression just saw the faint details in the red as big blobs. I love how much detail I got out of this. I know a lot of people are trying to do something really creative with a collection of images, else it’s just another eclipsed moon image, but still… this one is mine, and it’s just a well executed image with quite a bit of detail visible throughout.
Seems the clearest skies come with the brightest Moon. No problem, I love the moon too! I’ve been working on some new code that creates video files for “Lucky Imaging” and tried it out last night on the moon with a ZWO 120 Monochrome camera and a Sky-Watcher 180mm Mak-Cas telescope. I know it’s over kill, but the Paramount MX+ sure made this easy. Using ProTrack and the custom tracking rates, no matter where I put it on the Moon it just stayed right there. I did over 10,000 frames and stacked about 35% of the sharpest ones and then did a few final adjustments in Photoshop.
Mar Humorum is a buffet of different lunar features.
I love this area, there’s so much detail to be seen and all kinds of great geography to study.
