Astrophotography

One of my main goals in setting up this site was to share my pictures. I got involved in astrophotography for the first time in the Spring of 2005 with my C9.25 and Meade DSI and since then produced 182 images of 163 objects (10/19/2016). It is fun! Now, thanks to my observatory I can observe visually and image at the same time. I have two telescopes dedicated to imaging, three cameras and lots of other equipment.

Initially this page served as a complete guide to my equipment and imaging, but over time it grew too big, so I had to divide it by topics. Imaging equipment section and its subsections cover details of my imaging equipment and imaging aspects of my telescopes. General accessories page describes all non-imaging gear, and telescopes section hosts in-depth description of the telescopes I own (or owned).

This page links to my astrophotography gallery. There are two pages that are not galleries here: procedures describing the way I conduct various aspects of my imaging sessions and processing dealing with various image processing techniques I use.

The fastest way to get the newest objects is to go to "All objects", they are ordered from the newest to the oldest. "All pictures" lists the entire collection of images from the newest to the oldest - but there may be multiple images of the same object. For convenient access all the images are tagged with appropriate object information, and therefore can be displayed by category, catalog or image type. Here is the complete list, each page lists images ordered from newest to oldest:

• Solar system. Images of solar system objects: planets, comets and the Moon.

• Moon, high resolution. Close-ups of the Moon surface.

• Bright Nebulae. Emission nebulae (a cloud of ionized gas emitting light of various colors; object definition) and/or reflection nebulae (a cloud of dust and/or gas reflecting light of nearby stars; object definition), with planetary nebulae excluded.

• Galaxies. Images of galaxies (object definition).

• Globular Clusters. Images of globular clusters (tight spherical associations of many thousands of stars; object definition) .

• Open Clusters. Images of open (galactic) clusters - associations of young stars, slowly diffusing out (object definition).

• Planetary Nebulae. Images of planetary nebulae - emission nebulae formed by dying low-mass stars (object definition).

• Wide field. Images covering wide swath of the sky, usually with multiple objects.

• Narrowband. Images obtained in small subsection of visible spectrum, usually around Hα hydrogen emission line, OIII ionized oxygen emission line or SII sulfur emission line.

• Messier objects. Objects from Messier catalog, a collection of objects created by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1700s. Ordered by catalog number.

• NGC objects. Images of objects from New General Catalog (NGC). Ordered by catalog number.

• All objects. Images of all objects, one image per object.

• All pictures.

All above sections have "All pictures" subsections that list all images in this particular category.

Since March 2012 the gallery is served by my data management system. You can now click "toggle filtering" on the right above the image list and you will be able to search my images by many various keywords (objects, catalogs, equipment and more). The system is written in Perl using MySQL database for data storage.

NOTE: It is very important to make sure your display (monitor/LCD) is properly calibrated!