The beauty of astrophotography
Astrophotography is a lot more than just "taking a picture". It's about seeing beyond what appears to be, and unravelling some of the most beautiful parts of our universe through the quite frankly long and tedious process of astrophotography. Despite the difficulties, nothing matches the euphoria of finally finishing a picture you've been working on for countless hours, followed by the humbling moment when you realize what you've actually taken a picture of. That could be a nebula or a galaxy or even just a star, anything you look at out there, truly makes you realize how incomprehensible the vastness of our world is and the grandeur scale of our cosmos.
Every picture you'll see below in this gallery however, hides behind it countless hours of troubleshooting and head scratching. Regardless of that I believe astrophotography is one of the most rewarding hobbies and a case of "easy to learn hard to perfect". The key for me is not to be discouraged by the evident difficulty of it, but strive to always take steps forward, and most importantly share your experience with other people who share your love and passion for the subject.
An astrophotography how-to
Before getting to the final images, below I've created a very oversimplified 4 step guide to astrophotography or at least this is my interpretation of it. If you'd like to go directly to the gallery click below.
Step 1: Gear
For deep space imaging I use this setup. A Nikon D7500 attached on a Sky-watcher Evostar ED80 refractor telescope along with the ASI120mm which I use as a guide camera. Now all
of this is mounted on a go-to equatorial mount, a Sky-watcher HEQ-5 Pro. However depending on what you are trying to capture the, equipment required changes.
If you'd like to learn more about how the telescope works and what telescopes are used where click here:
Step 2: Setting up
This is always the fun part of the night. From setting up the telescope to looking up and trying to decide which part of the endless starry sky to unveil tonight. Before that however, picking the correct night is crucial!
In astrophotography we are trying to catch dim light coming from very distant objects, this means that any light pollution can affect our image quality. That is why its very important to make sure you are located as far away from artificial light sources as possible. As far as natural light pollution goes-and by that I mean the moon-it is better to find a night when the moon is in the new moon phase or at least far away from your target in the sky.
The weather is also one of astrophotographers' greatest enemies, but lets assume we are lucky and managed to get a clear night with perfect conditions. Then what?
Step 3: Shoot!
Now after all that setting up and preparation it is finally time to begin shooting. Don't get excited just yet however, the game is just starting!
Our goal is to capture as much light as possible to create one image from all that data so we set the shutter speed of the camera to as long as possible. The shutter speed is how long our camera can collect light, or how long it can keep the shutter open essentially. Lets say our shutter speed is two minutes. The image you see below is a very good representation of what one of these two minute frames look like. I know, very disappointing, looks nothing like the Andromeda galaxy. The key here
is patience and remaining
focused on our goal which
is a beautiful image of this
distant galaxy! Keep taking
these two minute shots, as
many as possible in order to stack them at the very end and finally make this whole process worthwhile.
Which gets us to the final step.
Step 4: Processing
Almost at the finish line. After capturing all those two-minute frames we use a stacking software which squishes all the light from every single frame onto one stacked image. Now all that's left is post-processing. After countless hours of editing the final stacked picture in photoshop trying to bring out the fadest of details and the tiniest bits of color, I present to you the great Andromeda galaxy. That's the magic of astrophotography.
The Andromeda Galaxy
M31, The Andromeda Galaxy! I've always used this target as a benchmark, photographing it every year trying to get better results each time as I learn my equipment better and generally the entire process. I want to believe that the improvement is visible in the pictures below as well, but that's up to you to decide.
This galaxy under very dark skies can actually be seen with the naked eye as a tiny smudge above the star Mirach in the Andromeda constellation. It is the closest spiral type galaxy from ours located 2.53 million light years from the Earth with a radius of 110000 light years. Originally discovered in 964 B.C by a Persian astronomer who described it as a "little cloud", however the first telescopic description of this galaxy was given in 1612 followed by Charles Messier in 1764 who catalogued it as object M31.
On the top left of M31, another satellite galaxy can be seen catalogued M110 which is in our local galaxy group as well along with another more faint satellite galaxy M32 which looks more like a large bright star slightly to the right of the Andromeda. Unfortunately for both us and the Andromeda we are on a collision course with this galaxy. In about 4.5 billion years our two galaxies which are also the largest in the local group will crash but, that is not to worry since we will probably not be around for that long, plus its a common thing in the universe for galaxies to collide. They form new galaxies called "irregular" as the supermassive black holes at their core slowly merge forming an even bigger one.
The Lagoon & Trifid Nebula
The Lagoon nebula or M8 along with its neighbor the Trifid nebula or M20 are massive interstellar gas clouds in the constellation of Sagittarius around 5000 and 4100 light years away from us respectively. The lagoon is a so called emission nebula, which is massive gas clouds that are being ionized by ultraviolet light from nearby stars causing them to emit light. Similarly the Trifid is also primarily an emission type nebula however also has some dark nebula parts. A dark nebula now is still an interstellar molecular cloud similar to the previous mentioned, however much denser thus obstructing visible light and can be seen in the pictures below as "patches" on the picture that are darker.
In these massive regions which are often called stellar nurseries, new stars form! Turbulence in these gas clouds causes it to collapse and through the slow contraction under gravity a new star is born. By observations it was also proven that in both the Lagoon and Trifid nebula new stars are in fact born!
Discovered in 1654, M8 is also one of the very few star-forming nebulae that are somewhat visible with the naked eye under dark skies. It's so bright, even with binoculars you can distinguish the core of the Lagoon, and for that reason it is a summer-season must in astrophotography.
