I am not only deep-sky astrophotographer. Every year I take part of the biggest youth astronomy camp in Slovenia – MART. I never take telescope there, because it’s too large and I prefer observing meteors during the camp. Usually the camp lasts during the maximum of Perseids, but this year there’s a moon and it was lasting from 24th July to 2th August 2009.
Yesterday some of my friends from MART came to go to observe the Perseids. We planned to go to Bohor, which is a hill just 20 min drive from my house, but when we came to the place it overcasted. We checked the satellite images and decided to go South-West. It was a good decision. After 1-hour drive we found pretty good place to observe and started observing about at midnight. We had 6 DSLRs, capturing the Perseids as well. I haven’t got any really nice and bright meteor, like my friend did, but I ended with a timelapse of the night.
I came back to home at 6.30 and went to bed at 7.00. But today there will be another night with less moon and more Perseids. If you have an opportunity, take a walk tonight and look up to the sky. I’m sure you will see one. My the best captured yesterday:
A friend of mine contacted me some days ago that he bought a new telescope (Orion Optics SPX 200 f/6.0) and asked me if he could came around to collimate it. We have arranged for Saturday evening.
He really came yesterday and we did a collimation really quickly with my laser collimator. BTW, this telescope is really gorgeous! After the collimation we planned to test the optics on the stars but it clouded. We checked the weather forecast and figured out that it might be clear just some hundred meters higher so we decided to go to Bohor (that’s a hill very near where I live) and we had right! It was clear but windy night up there! The moon was rising and shining extremely bright. We could admire an “ocean” of the fog / clouds below in lowlands. It was incredibly beautiful.
Anyway the wind was too strong and I have a little cold so we stayed there just to take some photos and that was it. It was worth to drive half an hour just to admire the nature for some minutes.
View to the South-West. The brightest object is Venus. @ Primož Cigler, Nejc Ucman
View to South-East. The brightest object up-left is the Moon @ Nejc Ucman, Primož Cigler
The astrophotography has its start over 150 years ago. It was Daguerre who “invented” it in 1839. He took the first picture of Moon with the purpose to create a detailed map of Moon’s surface. That tells us that these days astrophotography was used strictly in science world and was not accessible to everyone.
Later on a lot of invisible phenomenons was discovered with astrophotography, for example Sun’s Corona and a first Celestial map was created.
When the spectroscopy was invented in the beginning of the 20th century there were new findings one after another. Edwin Hubble, one of the most known astrophotographers, spent a lot of time researching the most distant galaxies with this type of astrophotography. He discovered redshift and made a theory that our Space expands which means that a long time ago everything we can see today, the whole cosmos, was smaller. And that’s the beggining of ‘BigBang’ theory.
Anyway, the most known Space Telescope was given the name of this American astronomer – Hubble.
In the first 50 years of the 20th century the whole astronomy equipment was very expensive, but in the 60’s the man called John Dobson decided and made a telescope on its own – with minimal costs. His type of telescope is still very popular and the name is – Dobson.
That’s when telescopes became widely accessible to practically everyone. With minimal costs and some hand skills there is reasonable easy to build-up a telescope. And that’s also the time when amateur astrophotography begun. Firstly there was not a lot photography equipment and tracking mounts were quite expensive but the prices are going down – still today. The last big-boom in the astrophotography was arrival of DSLRs. Every single astrophotograper could afford it and they pusshed away more expensive CCD cameras. The main advantage of them is that they can be used for daylight photography as well and that they assure a good image quality for extremely beautiful astrophotos.
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