West Coast Wonderlust : December 2016

Hey everyone,

I've been meaning to write a post about Astrophotography for some time now, but haven't found the time to get it done until now. So here goes nothing!

I started getting into astrophotography about two years ago. I kept seeing these beautiful landscape photos with the Milky Way Galaxy and various star constellations hanging overhead online (not to mention photos of the moon that looked like they had been taken by Apollo astronauts as they orbited the moon) and I wanted to try my own hand at it. Thanks to my generous family, I began using an older model Canon DSLR camera with the standard 18-55mm lens on it to try to make my own incredible images. Turned out that it wasn't as easy as it looked. The photos were grainy, uninteresting, and were absolutely nothing like I had seen. Disappointed, I went and started reading tons of guides on how to improve my skills at capturing the night sky.

A couple months and many nights of research and practice later, my birthday was coming up. My family was asking what I would like, and I had put some money away to invest in a little toy that I had been more and more interested in getting: a telescope.

Some people will think of the telescopes you find at places like Canadian Tire, Walmart, or the like and when they buy them, they are disappointed at the view they get and put the telescope away, never to be used again. I decided that instead of wasting my money and time I would invest in a more expensive, better-quality telescope while also not breaking my bank. I (along with some help from my family. Thank you!) ended up purchasing a Skywatcher 6" (150mm) Dobsonian Telescope for about $395.

Now, $400 may seem like quite a lot to spend on a telescope, but considering that the really nice, high-quality scopes go for anywhere between $800-$7000, the $400 doesn't seem so bad. The one I purchased was a large telescope for the money, and the reason it was inexpensive is because dobsonian telescopes are mounted on wooden bases instead of nice, expensive tripods or equatorial mounts (which will move the telescope at the same rate the stars move across the sky). Many equatorial mounts will cost at least $600 alone, and that's used. With my telescope, the large majority of the cost was due to the optics alone. The 6" aperture guaranteed the ability to have fairly clear views of not just the moon, but of several planets throughout the solar system. The way it works is that the wider of an aperture you have with telescopes, the crisper the view you'll have of planets that are both small, and extremely(!) far away. For example, Mars, which is the next planet past us, is anywhere between about 57 million kilometres to 401 million kilometres apart. In other words, it takes light anywhere between about 3 to 21 minutes to go from Earth to Mars. That's just one way too. It's VERY far away. To get a nice view of it, you want a larger telescope with a bigger aperture, and then you want varying eye pieces to have good magnification.

So, back in January of 2014 with my new telescope, Kait and I began staring up at the moon, planets, and planets' moons. We stumbled across Jupiter on our first night of observing which was a very pleasant surprise. The coolest thing that we noticed when checking back on Jupiter hours later was that Jupiter's closest moons had visibly shifted their position. One had swung around behind the giant planet. You could actually witness the moons moving around the planet itself.

The telescope and ammo can which holds all the extra gear.

While astronomy isn't quite as interesting and exciting for Kait as it is for me, we both enjoyed our new tool and began regularly setting it up on the patio outside our front door in North Vancouver, spending countless hours drinking tea and watching the stars. I was repeatedly blown away at how places that were previously just dots of light, or were only accessible through NASA pictures or books were now distant yet tangible places I could see with my own two eyes from my own home. Luckily for us, our rental suite was in a very nice neighbourhood perched up on a hill and had a great view of the sky to the East, South, and West.

Juptier viewed through the 10mm eyepiece.

Saturn viewed through the 10mm eyepiece. 1.4 billion km away.

Later that year, we made our move to Quadra Island and while there, I invested in both a T-adapter and an Eye Piece Projection kit. The T-adapter allowed me to physically attach my DSLR to the telescope itself to capture what's called "prime focus" images. It doesn't allow you to magnify the image through the telescope at all, but it didn't matter too much as the telescope itself magnified celestial objects almost equivalent to using a 25mm eyepiece, which is about 48x magnification. The Eye Piece Projection kit added another option to my astrophotography. It made it so I could add eyepieces in front of the camera in order to help magnify the image even more. This way, instead of seeing the entire moon, I could essentially zoom in with my camera and view individual mountain ranges and craters on the moon's surface. Laugh if you want to, but it's pretty damn amazing to see.

The full moon via prime focus.

The terminator of the moon when viewed through the 10mm eyepiece.

Between the Fall of 2015 when Kait and I got married and the Spring of 2016, the telescope went mostly unused. We had moved from Quadra into our own rental suite in Black Creek, and the surrounding trees made it nearly impossible to do much photography at night. I did manage to get a few photos at midnight as the new year began, but aside from that, I put it off until we moved one last time into a wonderful new home in Campbell River.

Freckle-sized Mars, 75 million km away through the 10mm eyepiece.

At our new place, we had a decent view of the night sky, and more time and energy to start using the telescope and camera again. The timing was great as Mars was coming up to opposition where it is the closest to Earth in its orbit. This occurs once every two years, and the distance at each opposition varies. This year it was only 75 million kilometres away while in 2018 it will be even closer at 57 million kilometres. In the telescope at that distance, Mars is about the size of a large freckle (see above). Other than Mars, I began trying to capture better pictures of the moon, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn as well as drawing my observations in an astronomy journal. The problem I had was that because I had no way of tracking the moon and planets as they moved across the sky, I was unable to take longer exposure photos of them, and so the quality of photos of Jupiter and Saturn was limited.

Drawing of the full moon

Drawing I made of Jupiter and its visible moons.

In the last few months of 2016, I have spent more time learning how to stack astrophotos. This is a process in which I take several photos (sometimes hundreds if not thousands of photos in the form of a video) of planets, stars, etc and then upload those photos/video into stacking software. The software will then take each individual photo, align them together, and stack each photo on top of the next, creating a brighter, clearer, sharper photo than any single exposure can create. While it has been a challenge (and continues to be in many cases with the video) this approach has led to some great photos, better than any I've ever taken. I'm finally getting close to those Milky Way photos I've been after for years. I've now been able to even capture some dim photos of deep sky objects such as the Orion Nebula, as well as constellations like the Pleiades (little dipper) and the Big Dipper (part of the Ursa Major constellation).

I plan on continuing with this nerdy hobby, capturing more and better photos of more various objects such as distant galaxies, nebula, and our own sun. Yes, you actually can stare at the sun through a giant magnifying glass, you just have to be smart about it.

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoy the photos posted above and below, and if you have any questions, ask away in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.

Good night everyone!

-K&A

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