Tag: astro

astrophotography

Comet Fever!

astro, topography

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to photograph three comets (so far) in my life, starting with Hale-Bopp in 1997. Add to that Neowise in 2020 and C/2022 E3 this year.

I shot Hale-Bopp from above the dam in Spring Valley on a cold night in March. The image here is a stack of the 4 frames I caught that night on color negative film with my trusty old Nikon F2, with a 200mm lens. I scanned the 4 negs with an Epson film scanner, adjusted the images in PS7, stacked them into a single image with StarStaX, and then cleaned up the final image again in PS7.

I captured this single, untracked image of Comet Neowise during the long summer of 2020, with a Nikon D750 DSLR, but with the same 200mm manual lens that I had captured Hale-Bopp two decades prior. The single image was exposed at ISO 4000 set at f/8 for 10 seconds.

Finally, I recently captured Comet C/2022 E3 as a series of 4 stacked images, taken again with a Nikon D750, this time through a 150-600mm C Sigma lens, all mounted on a iOptron Skyguider Pro star tracker. I processed the images in Deep Sky Stacker, Photomatix Pro and PS7.

Astrophotography

astro

I’ve been in love with images of outer space since I can remember. As a child, I watched spell-bound as our Astronauts landed on the moon, my own self-made cardboard models hanging from the ceiling mimicking the missions every move from launch, to lunar landing, to their return to Earth. The vivid paintings and eventual photographs in National Geographic over the years kept me captive for hours…

I acquired an iOptron Skyguider Pro camera mount system in 2019. This system aligns my camera to the north star and compensates for the earth’s rotation, allowing me to take extremely long exposures of the heavens, picking up faint sources of light from such bodies as nebula and galaxies that are otherwise hidden from our eyes. Further, I can enhance these images by taking multiple exposures during the night, and then “stacking” them with a multitude of free, open-source software available online.