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 moving into 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!
I cancelled my trip to Texas for the total eclipse, because the weather was so bad. But I did get a partial eclipse from my backyard in California, and made this little video.
And here’s something else that’s quite unusual. In May of 2024, during the time when so much of the US was seeing the Aurora Borealis, it was on the horizon all the way down here in Central California, where even the most optimistic aurora maps did not predict it. This is what it looks like when you set your camera to take an image every 2.5 minutes, from dark till dawn, with a light Aurora at the horizon. Because I'm pointed roughly north, you can watch the stars and constellations (look for the Big Dipper) appear to rotate around the polar star (actually we are the ones rotating). The little lines that appear and disappear are seven-second paths of planes and satellites. And the Aurora was better than I realized from any one still image. I strongly suggest you double-click this to open it up to full screen. Otherwise the important part is cut off.
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.
