Astrophotography

Amateur astrophotography from roughly 2014 to 2020, running outward from the planets next door to the Andromeda Galaxy two and a half million light-years away.

Equipment & technique

Most of these were shot with a Canon EOS Rebel T3i riding on whatever telescope I could get time on, from a backyard 12-inch Dobsonian up to the long historic refractor at Cornell's Fuertes Observatory, which shows up in these notes as "Irv". The deep-sky objects are usually stacks of long exposures; the planets are lucky imaging, the sharpest few percent of tens of thousands of video frames combined into one. The notes are my own from the time, lightly tidied.

Astrophotographs

Solar System

Planets

Jupiter with cloud bands and the shadow of Io transiting the disc — Jupiter, with the Great Red Spot visible, and the banding of its storms drawn out. The sharpest 5% of 30,000 video frames, stacked. Canon T3i + 2× Barlow on the Irving Porter Church Memorial Telescope, Fuertes Observatory · 2018

Venus as a bright featureless disc — Venus, a brilliant featureless disc. Like the Moon it runs through phases; this was my first one of reasonable quality, from eighteen thousand stacked frames. T3i + 2× Barlow on "Irv" · 2018

Mars showing a polar ice cap and dark surface markings — Mars, with a bright polar ice cap at one edge and dark albedo markings across the disc. My first image of Mars at any reasonable quality. Canon T3i through an Orion XT12i (12-inch Dobsonian) · 2016

Saturn with its rings and the Cassini division — Saturn, its rings tilted wide open with the dark Cassini division cleanly splitting them. The sharpest frames of a long video, stacked. Canon T3i + 2× Barlow · 2017

Uranus as a small pale green disc — Uranus, a featureless pale green disc almost two billion miles out, barely more than a coloured point even at high power. Just showing it as a disc rather than a star was the whole achievement. Canon T3i · 19 September 2017

Neptune as a faint blue speck — Neptune, the outermost planet, a faint blue speck near three billion miles away. The hardest of the planets to catch, and the last one I needed for the set. Canon T3i · 19 September 2017

Comets

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

Comet NEOWISE high in a starry twilight sky with its tail drawn out — Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), the brightest comet visible from the northern hemisphere in a generation, its dust tail drawn out cleanly against a deep twilight sky. It will not return for about 6,800 years. 17 July 2020

Comet NEOWISE low over a lake and treeline — The same comet lower toward the horizon, hanging over the water beyond a dark treeline. 13 July 2020

Deep Sky

Nebulae

The Orion Nebula, M42 — The Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery 1,300 light-years off. My first try at high-dynamic-range compositing, which the nebula forces on you: the brightness runs over an enormous range from the searing Trapezium core to the faint outer wings, too much for any single exposure. 10 frames each at 1, 5, 10 and 30 s through "Irv" with a 2× Barlow · 2018

The Crab Nebula, M1 — The Crab Nebula, the still-expanding wreckage of a supernova that Chinese astronomers recorded in 1054. I shot it on a whim and the stacking pulled out far more than the raw frames promised: the central pulsar is plainly there, wrapped in the glow of its plerion. 25 × 30 s at ISO 6400, T3i + 2× Barlow on "Irv"; 11 of 22 frames stacked · 2018

The Ring Nebula, M57 — The Ring Nebula in Lyra, a shell of gas puffed off by a dying sun-like star and lit from within. date uncertain

The Owl Nebula, M97 — The Owl Nebula, a planetary nebula in Ursa Major named for the two dark hollows that stare out of it like a pair of eyes. It is the shell of gas an aging star has breathed off, about 2,000 light-years away. Stacked exposures, Canon T3i · 8 May 2018

Open star clusters

The Pleiades, M45 — The Pleiades: young, hot, blue stars still tangled in the faint reflection nebulosity they were born from. One of the first astrophotos I was ever proud of, and the first time I thought maybe I could actually do this. Single-shot exposure, tripod-mounted untracked T3i · 2015

Globular clusters

The globular cluster M3 — M3, a globular cluster of roughly half a million stars bound into a dense sphere, one of the oldest structures in the galaxy at some eleven billion years. Stacking resolved the core from a fuzzy smudge into a swarm of individual suns. Stacked exposures, Canon T3i · date uncertain

Galaxies

The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51 — The Whirlpool Galaxy and its small companion, caught mid-collision. This one was stacked by hand in GIMP after DeepSkyStacker flatly refused to combine more than five frames, a method a stranger on the internet was kind enough to walk me through. 2018

Bode's Galaxy, M81 — Bode's Galaxy, a grand-design spiral in Ursa Major. 2020

The Cigar Galaxy, M82 — The Cigar Galaxy, M81's neighbor, seen edge-on and lit up red down its middle: a starburst set off by the gravitational pull of its larger companion. 2020

The Needle Galaxy, C38 — The Needle Galaxy, a spiral turned so perfectly edge-on that it thins to a sliver of light with a dark dust lane down its spine. 2020

The Andromeda Galaxy, M31 — The Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest large galaxy to ours and the most distant thing a human eye can see unaided, two and a half million light-years away. This was my favorite photograph for years; a print of it hung in my grandmother's living room. ISO 3200, f/5.6, 25 × 30 s with darks, flats and biases, T3i at 250 mm · 2015