Astrophotography

While many of the most famous images in astronomy (for example the Pillars of Creation) have been taken by very expensive telescopes like Hubble, that is not to say that amateurs can not take very beautiful images as well.  As Richard pointed out in his post on Sunday, not everything needs to be observed with a large telescope.  In fact, large, expensive telescopes can miss rare events simply because there are relatively few of them observing at one time.  In other words, you can't look everywhere at once.

That is where amateur astronomers come in.  Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can find where in the sky to look to see events like meteor showers, conjunctions (eg. two planets appearing to come together in the sky), and transits (eg. a planet passing in front of the sun).  I am particularly fond of SpaceWeather.com, which also lets you know when to look out for aurorae and posts some amazing images.  One of those images that I remember in particular was of a transit of the International Space Station.  The picture I remember was of a transit across the sun rather than the moon (there are actually quite a few of those in Google images results), but the interesting part is that these were done by an amateur using a small (10") telescope and a video camera.  He even has a website dedicated to ISS transits with several more photos and videos.

Probably the best website for an introduction to astrophotography is called Catching the Light.  It includes guides on how to use a DSLR for astrophotography, processing images in Photoshop, and image galleries (which are definitely worth checking out even if you aren't interested in the rest).  I picked out my favorite picture from the DSLR showcase gallery to show just how good these look.  Yes...that is an amaeur image (of M31 Andromeda).  The description of the equipment used, exposure, processing, etc. is here if you are interested.

My own attempts at astrophotography have been rather less successful, to say the least.  This could mostly be attributed to the fact that I attempt to use the lenses I already own rather rather than buying a proper telescope mount.  Given that fact, the only truly successful shoot I've had was during a partial solar eclipse on May 20, 2012.  A word of caution:  Don't point your camera directly at the sun!  I was using an R72 filter, which blocks out light with a wavelength shorter than 720nm.  It looks nearly black because that is what is visible to the human eye.  Also, most cameras have a built-in filter to block out infrared, so almost no light was getting through, making it safe for me to take pictures of the sun.  Mostly to prove I can do better than a featureless photo of the sun, here is my 500px page, which is in desperate need of updating.