To boldly go

To boldly go

My daughter-in-law finds excellent photographic presents for me: Christmas brought me a copy of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021 book. More than most genres, Astra photography is about finding hidden beauty: the equipment and the techniques are highly specialised, and almost every shot is the result of combining at least two frames, even if they are simply of the same scene with different exposure times to allow star detail and foreground detail.

But it’s not uncommon for hundreds of images to be combined, sometimes with images shot with more than one camera. It’s photography, Jim, but not as we know it. A few images in the book have been shot with a conventional camera on a conventional tripod, but many of them involve very unusual equipment. Small – and not so small – telescopes (mostly reflector style, with a design that will be familiar, in general terms, to mirror lens users) feature, along with equatorial mounts (which compensate for the earth’s rotation and keep a telescope pointed at the same small area of sky: from around £300 if your telescope comes without one, it seems) and filters that make my IR and UV setups seemed very commonplace.



Extensive processing seems to be a requirement just to achieve the basic image. But this isn’t about falsifying reality, so much as making it possible to get an image of scenes that are invisible to the naked eye. I’d have liked to make this blog quite heavily biased towards technique, but I freely admit that most of the techniques are completely beyond my knowledge (and probably my understanding). I suspect I know one or two people who could make a decent stab at explaining them, and perhaps we should all hope this will stimulate them to have a go. The price tags attached to the equipment are not insignificant.

It would be very easy to spend money on trying this out: but I live near Birmingham, and the levels of light pollution are incredibly high, so that seeing any stars at all on a night that’s less than perfectly clear is a challenge. If I had dark night skies, I would be sorely tempted!