Table Of ContentGregory I. Redfern
Astrophotography
is Easy!
Basics for Beginners
The Patrick Moore
The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series
Series Editor
Gerald R. Hubbell
Mark Slade Remote Observatory, Locust Grove, VA, USA
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/3192
Astrophotography
is Easy!
Basics for Beginners
Gregory I. Redfern
Gregory I. Redfern
Ruckersville, VA, USA
ISSN 1431-9756 ISSN 2197-6562 (electronic)
The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series
ISBN 978-3-030-45942-0 ISBN 978-3-030-45943-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45943-7
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For Clara
May the sky
always remind
you
of
me
Foreword
Dr. Richard Tresch Fienberg is Press Officer of the American Astronomical
Society and former Editor in Chief of Sky & Telescope magazine. The
International Astronomical Union has named asteroid 9983 Rickfienberg in
his honor. Though trained as a professional astronomer, Rick remains an
amateur at heart, observing the sky and taking astrophotos from his hilltop
observatory in central New Hampshire.
About 15 years ago, while I was working at Sky & Telescope magazine,
I was invited to speak at an amateur astronomy convention on any topic of
my choosing. I had recently resumed taking astronomical pictures thanks to
the invention of consumer digital cameras and decided that astrophotogra-
phy would make a fine topic for two reasons. First, as editor of a monthly
astronomy magazine, I was inundated by submissions of astro-images from
our readers, some of whom were among the most talented practitioners of
the art. So I had plenty of material to mine for illustrations. Second, I was
really excited by the astrophotos I was shooting myself with digital cam-
eras, sometimes through lenses and sometimes through telescopes. This
meant I actually knew something about the subject! I entitled my talk
“Anyone Can Take a Decent Astrophoto” and used my own experience as a
newbie sky-shooter to prove my point.
I wrote that I “resumed taking astronomical pictures” because I had tried
capturing images of celestial objects many times over my decades in astron-
omy but had always given up. It was just too difficult with film cameras.
There was no way to tell while out under the stars if you were doing a good
job of focusing, tracking your target as Earth turned, and choosing the right
vii
viii Foreword
exposure times. You had to wait ‘til your prints or slides came back from
your local camera shop or drugstore to know how you did. And if the results
weren’t to your liking — as they rarely were for me — you had to start over
and go through the whole process again, and perhaps again and again. I
simply didn’t have the patience for it.
With digital cameras, though, you see your images as soon as you shoot
them. If the focus or framing isn’t perfect, you make the necessary adjust-
ment, shoot again, examine the result, and repeat till you’re happy — all
within just a few minutes. And the sensors in digital cameras and built into
smartphones are much more sensitive than film, making it possible to shoot
attractive wide-field photos of the night sky capturing constellations and the
Milky Way with your camera on a fixed tripod rather than a motorized
tracking mount. Not just easy, but very satisfying!
As you work your way up the learning curve and get more ambitious,
there’s no shortage of computerized telescopes and electronic accessories to
make things easy and virtually guarantee a successful outcome. And the
image-processing software available today makes turning even a modest
astrophoto into something truly stunning — perhaps even worthy of publi-
cation in a magazine like Sky & Telescope. This is truly a golden age of
astrophotography.
Of course, whenever you try something new, you face an inevitable
period of trial and error. In my case, it was often more error than trial. I’d
have been very grateful for a book like Greg Redfern’s when I was starting
out shooting the sky. Greg, whom I’ve known for a long time and whose
talents are well known among astronomers and astrophotographers, is a ter-
rific guide. His advice is accurate, sensible, and grounded in his own exten-
sive experience. As a bonus, you’ll also get advice from several other
leading astro-imagers whom Greg has invited to weigh in on specific topics
of particular interest.
With this book as a road map, anyone can do more than just take a decent
astrophoto: anyone can take many really good astrophotos and enjoy a life-
time of celestial exploration!
American Astronomical Society Richard Tresch Fienberg
Washington, DC, USA
Preface
A half-century ago there were no books that I could find in the library on
astrophotography, so I basically learned by doing, with a lot of errors along
the way. As a teenager who grew up in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo era,
I took my first astropic of the Moon using my Edmund Scientific 6-inch f/8
Newtonian reflector on an equatorial mount with a Praktika FX 35-mm
camera body with no lens. I took a “prime focus” image – putting the cam-
era body with an adapter into the telescope’s eyepiece holder – using
Kodak’s fine grain 200 ASA “Plus-X” 35-mm film. There was a bracket on
the telescope that held an aluminum pole that allowed for safely projecting
white light views of the Sun onto a white metal plate to view. This bracket
could also be used as a holder to place the camera very close to the eyepiece
for “afocal” shots, using the camera’s lens to focus on the image in the eye-
piece, of the Moon and planets. For “eyepiece projection” shots, I used an
eyepiece in a holder mated to a camera body placed in the eyepiece focuser
to get a shot. I had three basic eyepieces of one inch, half of an inch, and
quarter of an inch focal length with a 2x Barlow, an optical accessory that
increases eyepiece magnification.
I had built a small darkroom in the family garage so I could develop my
own black and white film. I eventually also added Kodak High Speed
Ektachrome – 400 ASA – to my film processing capabilities. When the
ultra-fast (for the day) Tri-X 400 ASA black-and-white film came out,
I bought it in bulk rolls so I could make my own 36-exposure rolls. The bulk
film roll went into a film cassette loader, and you would turn a crank
so many times for so many exposures to be loaded into the 35-mm film
ix
x Preface
cassette. You had to place the film loader and the reusable film cassette in a
lightproof changing bag, feel your way (not on the film emulsion side!)
through the loading process on to a film spool. The end had to be secured
with tape, and you had to make sure the reusable film cassette top was
securely snapped in place and light tight. This took some practice to get
right, believe me!
Once the film to be used was loaded in the camera, it then became a mat-
ter of getting everything right for telescope-camera and the astronomical
object being photographed. I shot mostly lunar astropics, along with some
planetary images (I did not have a camera lens so for a while did not have
Camera Only capabilities). I couldn’t afford one after buying all of the other
equipment. I manually kept a photo log book recording each astropic’s
details and commentary on how it turned out. I still have the log books,
After the last exposure on the roll was taken, it then became a matter of
properly developing the film and seeing how the resulting negative images
turned out. I had an enlarger so I could make prints of my astropics. I even-
tually sold the photo gear, telescope and enlarger but I still have the Praktika
camera body, enlarger lens and some of my negatives and prints. They
weren’t the greatest astropics, but they were mine and done lovingly from
start to finish.
I finally got (and still have) a camera lens – a Vivitar 135-mm f/2.8 – so
I could initially take High Speed Ektachrome color slides off the family TV
set to personally record the missions of Apollo 8 and 11. I still have those
slides, TV cycle lines and all.
Fig. P.1. View of the Moon from Apollo 8 TV image, December 25, 1968 (Image by
the author.)
Preface xi
In 1974 I bought a Minolta SRT-101 35-mm film camera with a 50-mm
f/1.2 lens at the San Diego Navy Exchange, which I still have. I took thou-
sands of land, sea and some sky pics with that camera while on active duty
with the U. S. Navy. I didn’t take astropics in Camera and Telescope mode
with it until I acquired an 8-inch f/10 Criterion Dynascope Schmidt
Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) in 1980 after selling the 6-inch. I had finally
acquired my first books on astrophotography in 1979 to help out my prog-
ress and kept adding to my library over the years.
I used the various Kodak and Agfa black-and-white and color films avail-
able and used commercial film processing. Lunar and planetary were my
mainstays in astropics. I took mostly Camera and Telescope with a few
Camera Only astropics. These two astrophotography modes are a continu-
ing theme throughout the book and refer to the two separate means by
which astropics can be taken.
I had more time to take astropics while on Adak Island in the Alaskan
Aleutians, but with only three days of sunshine a year, sessions were far and
few!
Fig. P.2. Getting ready for a rare clear day and night. Author’s telescope on Adak
Island, Alaska, 1984. (Image by the Author)
I think I can lay claim to being the only human being to ever photograph
Halley’s Comet from Adak, Alaska. I did so in between snowstorms in
1985. Not much to look at on the slide, but it is there!
