Before the days of sensitive, low-noise digital cameras, amateur and professional astronomers used chemical emulsions on cellulose film or glass plates to record photographic images. But film astrophotography was not for the faint of heart – it took time, patience, and more than a little skill to produce good images of deep-sky objects or the Milky Way. Modern digital cameras now make astrophotography so much easier, of course, so why would anyone use film anymore? [Read more…] about Milky Way Photography on Medium-Format Film – A Q&A With James Cormier
Share This:Astronomy Images and Video
Beautiful and interesting images and video of the night sky including stars, planets, the Milky Way, and deep-sky objects taken through a camera lens or through a telescope.
The Pleasures of Ugly Astrophotography
A recent thread on the astronomy forum Cloudy Nights explored the possibility of capturing quick ‘snapshot’ astrophotos with small but sensitive monochrome cameras and inexpensive, small-aperture lenses of less than 25mm (!) aperture. Even better, this approach used no astronomy mount or tracking at all, just a fixed camera tripod and a PC to capture and stack each image over the course of a minute or two. Lightweight, cheap, simple.
It seemed like a preposterous idea. So of course I had to try it!
[Read more…] about The Pleasures of Ugly Astrophotography
Share This:Five Favorite Images from 2020
To call me an astrophotographer would be an overstatement. But that doesn’t stop me from bringing a camera along when stargazing on a clear night to complement some casual visual observations. No image can reproduce what it’s like to look through a telescope or binoculars, especially in dark sky when the eye beholds the scintillation of stars and silver-white nebulae and galaxies against the black matte of the background universe. But images have the advantage of permanence, to some degree at least, and of leaving a record of what we’ve seen and where we’ve been in the night sky over the months and years [Read more…] about Five Favorite Images from 2020
Share This:The Golden Light of a Winter Solstice
“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”
― John Steinbeck
On December 21, 2018 at 22:23 Universal Time, the Sun reaches the December solstice, its most southern point on the ecliptic. This marks the first day of winter in the northern hemisphere and the first day of summer in the southern hemisphere [Read more…] about The Golden Light of a Winter Solstice
Share This:Dawn Sky – Crescent Moon, Mercury, Regulus, and Orion
After a cloudy night, the sky cleared as dawn arrived on a late summer morning as seen from Bruneau Dunes State Park in southern Idaho on September 8, 2018. Here you see a very slender waning crescent Moon to the upper left of the star Regulus. Mercury is at the lower middle of this image, just above the clouds. Just minutes earlier, the constellation Orion tried to peak through the early-morning clouds (see below) [Read more…] about Dawn Sky – Crescent Moon, Mercury, Regulus, and Orion
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