My Astrophoto Gallery & Cool Videos
Ever since I was a child I have been trying to find ways to take photos of near and distant things in the sky starting with holding my film instamatic camera up to the eyepiece of my childhood scope to try and get sunspot pictures! This continued sporadically through my career to ever more complicated endeavors culminating now with an auto-guided mount and digital camera which I'm just starting to get the hang of. Of course the more you know the more you realize what you don’t know! I now have four different scopes I can shoot through
Below is a gallery of some of my more interesting shots going back to the 1980s. Spring 2020 was a lot of galaxies to shoot from home.
My Videos
From time to time I post videos on YouTube about astrophotography or some fun astro adventure. Here they are, most recent at the top.
My First Video of 2024: “Northern Nebulae”
My first video of 2024 was a collection of nebula photos featuring all the great stuff in the northern sky. Sometimes we lose track of the beauty and majesty that we’re a part of and this helps remind me to contemplate a bigger picture than our day-to-day existence.
I set it to the singing bowl music of Ron Esposito which were some of my favorite studio projects I ever did; very creative and always pushing boundaries. Ron passed in 2023 and this is a tribute to him and his spirit as well.
Building My Personal Observatory Series-5 Episodes
Part five of my “building your own observatory” series: final assembly and testing.
The Palmetto Bluff Montage Hotel recently bought this scope for use with their guests and I put it together and will figure out how to use it; if we ever get a clear night! Very curious to see how the StarSense automatic alignment thing works.
This was a live-stream of my telescope on a number of deep-sky objects. I wanted to check out how well LiveStacking works in SharpCap and what kind of images you can get, even when the Moon is up. I couldn’t figure out how to trim the welcome screen so fast forward to 6 min 10 sec for the start of the program.
In this video I detail how I went about getting together the necessary equipment to do planetary astrophotography why I chose it, assembling it all and then giving it a test run which ended in abject failure! The second part of the video details my process in getting things corrected.
In the past year I've gone to motorized focus control on my photographic scopes and in doing so, found out about a whole bunch of things that I wasn't really aware of and didn’t know I’d be dealing with. But after some practice I’m getting it together.
I ended up moving the EAF from this scope to the new 11-inch RASA (video above this one). Focus is much more critical on an f/2 scope!
I don’t have this scope anymore, replaced by an Obsession 18-inch GoTo Dobsonian scope.
Educational Videos
From time to time I run across interesting videos that are both well-done and educational. The impressive size of the universe and the scale of it all is one of my favorite topics so when I run across a quality production like the one below from the European Southern Observatory, it deserves a re-post here. It's fun to locate the stars mentioned in this video in the sky when you're out at night; makes it all a bit more real and tangible!