I should rather say that I started astrophotography as since the very beginning, even before buying my first telescope, I had began taking photographs of constellations with my camera attached to a small barn door-type equatorial mount whose screw I would patiently turn by hand.
Shortly later, I purchased my first telescope and began building this site and uploading my first silver halide images.
Since then, amateur astrophotography has considerably evolved. First with the webcam revolution : with those cheap small cameras, you can film planets at a high rate to freeze turbulence, select the best among tens or hundreds of frames of the film and then composit them to create a high resolution image. Finished with silver halide photographs of planets, most of them blurred by turbulence, ending their carrer in the dust bin. Farewell to completely wasted 24 x 36 films...
Webcam users later undertook shooting long exposures with their cameras, in order to take on deep sky objects : nebulae, clusters and galaxies. Long exposure webcam images can't rival those of real astro CCD cameras, whose cooled CCD chips can lower thermal signal and noise. But the solution was much, much cheaper and had the virtue of resulting from a true reflexion and engineering process of their instigators.
Then appeared DSLR's cameras, some of them specially modified for astronomy. With their huge chips, they allow taking wide field images, even if they still suffer the flaws of non-cooled devices.
In this proliferation of technical evolutions, you can't follow all tracks...
I gave up planetary imaging, which demands an excellent observing site, as little turbulent as possible. I chose, indeed, to set up my telescope definitely, under a roof window, which has the flaw of seriously limiting the field of view in right ascension as well as in declination, but also to induce a rather strong turbulence.
I did not follow the long exposure modified webcam track either but decided to buy my fisrt CCD camera and start deep sky imaging, which is less demanding as long as turbulence is concerned, but more demanding about the quality of polar alignment and guiding, which I can better master with a fixed setup.
Alas, when I compare my CCD images with those of the Grand Masters of this speciality, I find them quite poor. Indeed, that is the point when the "dollar factor" comes on stage. Once I made fun trying to evaluate the price of the whole setup of one of those masters : I found out that his telescope was worth as much as a nice car. I mean the optical tube only, as the mount was worth as much as a second nice car. And the CCD camera too, which cost as much as a third car... Not to mention the accessory devices, computers, observatories, sometimes built on a piece of real estate of the dry Arizona plateaus...
It's then I decided to neglect imaging, knowing I would never compete with my own tools and would be limited to making again and again the same photographs some others would take and hundred times better...
I then turned to more scientific applications : some tries in photometry, with for instance the setting of HR diagrams of some open star clusters ; but especially I started spectrography.
Paradoxically, and allthough you expect quantitaive results, this matter is not so much demanding concerning for instance guiding quality, sky transparency and stability. Moreover, you can go into it with a rather unpretentious setup and quickly obtain results with hold a true astrophysical value.
I envite you to discover all those subjects in visiting this site...
Have a good visit !
vistors on this site since 1999.
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