Deep Sky Astrophotography

DEEP SKY PHOTOGRAPHS are obtained with a variety of focal lengths, from very wide field Milky Way images with a DSLR lens to more narrow focused images with my 360 mm and 710 mm focal length telescopes. In general, fairly low powered telescopes are used as many of these heavenly bodies can cover vast swathes of the night sky but are invisible to the naked eye. Specialized tracking mounts that follow the stars as the Earth rotates are used to allow capture of long exposures. Some exposures can be as long as 6 minutes but photographic sessions of a particular object will utilize hours to weeks of compiled data. A windy moment, a passing airplane, satellite, or cloud can ruin a single exposure. Therefore long exposures utilize adding hundreds of shorter captures. The cameras utilized include near infrared adapted DSLRs or specialized black and white astrophotography camera that make use of special "narrowband" filters to detect ionized hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. All images are computer processed with enhancement of the nuances in elemental color