A First attempt at Astro-photography: The Orion Nebula and Saturn

    Unfortunately, sometime within the last few months, I was diagnosed with a very expensive illness that makes for cold, sleepless nights and long periods of time staring at the sky. That's right, the astronomy bug.

    Being a very wide field with so much to learn and so many different things to try, getting into astronomy reminds me very much of the overwhelming, yet exciting feeling I had when venturing into photography.

    So, for the last few clear nights, I've been stargazing through the glory of a big 10" scope (a Meade LX200R). It is a truly amazing piece of hardware: GPS, super smooth slewing and tracking and Ritchey-Chretien optics (same as the Hubble).


    Last night was the first night ever (after only 3 nights of viewing), that I decided to try some down and dirty astro-photography. I say "down and dirty" because true astro-photographers use a complex method of photography involving two cameras, one for guiding the scope through a finder scope, and one for doing the imaging itself. The advanced guys also take advantage of a CCD's linear exposure recording and "stack" multiple images of the same scene for the benefit of better dynamic range and noise performance.

    As I am still learning those techniques, I decided to take a much simpler approach last night. After aligning the scope, I had the scope track the target. Using a T-Adapter, I connected my trusty Nikon D200 SLR to the scope and took a single Raw exposure (repeating until I got a somewhat focused shot). I later processed in Photoshop. These are the results.