Welcome to '...a shot in the dark astro Photography'

Although I have always had a keen interest in astronomy, I didn't start on my journey into astrophotography until 2020.

Advances in technology and software over recent years has now brought this fascinating subject into the reach of the enthusiastic hobbyist.

This is the place where I attempt to record my journey in this fascinating hobby; including the techniques I use, the targets I have imaged and of course the images themselves.

Where available I have included a link to my Astrobin account in the description for my astrophotography images. This allows you to view the images in high resolution, and also gives information on image acquisition and processing.

Thanks for looking!

Imaging the Night Sky

Images of the stars at night including the Milky Way can be obtained quite simply using a mobile phone or DSLR camera and a tripod.

However, if we want to get more detail in the images we need longer exposure times. The problem here is that when exposure times exceed around 25 seconds we will begin to see 'trailing' of the stars, due to their movement across the night sky; although, sometimes we might actually want this effect in our image, which is fine. However, most times we want round stars in our image, and for some of the faint deep sky objects we may need exposure times of several minutes. Therefore in order to maintain pin point stars we need the camera to be able to track stars across the sky. We can do this by placing the camera on a tracking mount. Tracking mounts can vary from a simple star tracker to a sophisticated computer controlled mount.

The camera we use can be a mobile phone for wide field of views, a DSLR type camera or a dedicated astrophotography camera. We can use a normal camera lens or we can attach the camera to a telescope (which is basically acting as a large telephoto lens).

Once we have our gear assembled we can move on to image acquisition and image processing

GEAR

IMAGE ACQUISITION

IMAGE PROCESSING

The End Results

I have grouped my astro images into the following categories: -

Galaxies

Bright Nebulae

Dark Nebulae

Other Objects

Seestar Images

My astro images can also be viewed in the following albums on by Flickr account

Visions of Space

Astro Wall Art