HOW TO PHOTOGRAPH THE NIGHT SKY And do it properly
Let’s start at the beginning, all those lovely pictures you see of things in the heavens aren’t called photographs, they’re images and the reason for the name change is a very good one that I’ll get to shortly.
I’ll begin over 50 years ago when I was a youngster working part of my holidays as a gofer in a small observatory. A major part of my job was to process the photo plates produced by real astronomers, these were 5×7 inch negatives. Each plate would be the result of a long time in a special receiver attached to a telescope that had a clock drive to keep it trained on a particular part of the sky.
Those days are long gone, for many years now we’ve been doing things electronically with special cameras attached to telescopes that have electric drives. For most of my life these have needed some degree of setting up, care and maintenance with expensive gear to keep everything working well, but they have produced results that we could only dream of all those years ago.
Moving on again amateurs began using electronic cameras, and home computers and before you knew it amateurs were making images that the 200 inch Mount Palomar observatory would have dreamed about all those years ago.
The secret to this success, of how to photograph the night sky, and also why we don’t call the images photographs, is that what you see is the result of many individual photographs, sometimes thousands, overlaid on top of each other to produce a finished image, this is called stacking.
So, what has changed recently? There have been a number of relatively cheap digital astrocams introduced that do so much of the donkey work automatically, and are controlled by your smartphone. They can find and track an object in the sky, keep it precisely in view and take a photo every so often and store it ready for processing in your computer. By cheap I mean from around 300€ upwards, the Seestar S50 costs around 600€ and is being used by a couple of our members ( I’m making no claims about this being good or the best model) and is turning out some remarkable pictures of the deep sky (galaxies and nebula, not planets). If you want a piece of equipment that’s large and impressive, you’ll be disappointed, these cameras are small with tiny tripods which is part of what makes them so special.
There is always a ‘but’ with astronomy, in this case it’s the time spent on each image to produce a decent result. It takes time and skill to produce an end result and if you try one you’ll have a learning curve and hours spent in front of your computer, but if you love astronomy, it’s worth it.
Today’s picture was made by my friend Ron using a Seestar s50 and is of the witches broom nebula in Cygnus, it’s very beautiful.
Charles Oates, Vega Baja Astronomy Group.
● To find out more about observing and astronomy why not join our group, email us at vegabaja.astronomygroup@gmail.com to find out more.
