My Astrophotography
***PLEASE NOTE: Each of these images is the first in a gallery. If you click the arrows or click on the thumbnails below you’ll see there are dozens more.***
I’m just wrapping up my fifth year of astrophotography. I’ve learned a lot, and have a long way left to go. Here are my favorites of the celestial objects I have managed to capture so far. I will update this page as the hobby progresses.
Just click the arrows to move from one slide to the next. If you hover your cursor over the photo, a caption will identify what you’re seeing.
Before we get into the slide shows, here’s one big image not like all the rest. It’s the Teapot Asterism (lower left) rising from behind the trees. They say if you can capture the Galactic Center (Milky Way) behind it, it looks like steam coming out of the spout. I was surprised by how many deep sky images I had captured, so I annotated the image and made a collage with six close-ups of those deep sky objects. It’s a big universe. Have fun on this page!
And here’s something else that’s quite unusual. In October of 2024, during the time when so much of the US was seeing the Aurora Borealis, it put on an amazing show down here in Central California, which is a pretty once-in-a-lifetime event. This is what it looks like when you set your camera to take an image every 2 minutes, from dark till dawn, and put them all together into a video. It was cloudy to start the night, bit that was not nearly the impediment I thought it might be.
This first slide show includes some of my favorite targets, nebulae. I’ll include other targets such as galaxies below.
And here are what I consider the best of the galaxies I’ve imaged so far.
Closer to home, here are some shots of our own solar system, including my newest passion (safe) solar imaging.
Here are a few shots that don’t all fit into one category, mostly comets, star clusters, and the Milky Way.
And here’s a new category… starless images. In general, I believe images should have stars. After all, the sky has them. But I’ve been removing the stars and processing them separately, then adding them back in. Some of the images are so hauntingly beautiful and so unusually detailed without them that I just felt I had to share.
