My Trip up the Astrophoto Learning Curve!

These pictures were taken in August 2004 at a relatively dark sky site in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (well, dark compared to the suburbs of Washington D.C., but not dark by west coast or Australian standards!). These are some of my first astrophotos. I'm starting off easy by shooting piggyback with a camera and using a much bigger telescope for hand guiding. These were shot on 35 mm Elite Chrome 200 (pushed 1 stop), and scanned on a Konica Minolta Scan Dual IV film scanner (some of my tests of the Scan Dual IV are available here). 

	The North American Nebula in Cygnus
Camera: Pentax Super Program Lens: Pentax A-series 135mm f/2.8 @f/2.8 Technique: Piggyback on (and hand-guided with) a Celestron 14 CGE Film: Kodak Elite 200 pushed 1 stop Exposure: About 10 minutes Scanner: Konica Minolta Scan Dual IV Processing: Photoshop 6.0

The Milky Way through Cygnus, Lyra, and Vulpecula

Camera: Pentax Super Program Lens: Pentax A-series 28mm f/2.8 @f/2.8 Technique: Piggyback on (and hand-guided with) a Celestron 14 CGE Film: Kodak Elite 200 pushed 1 stop Exposure: About 15 minutes Scanner: Konica Minolta Scan Dual IV Processing: Photoshop 6.0 Notes: The North American nebula (seen in close-up in the first picture at the top of this page) is visible to the lower left center in this picture. The shadow in the center foreground is the tube of my C14, apparently reflecting some lights from the nearby house. The ring nebula in Lyra and the dumbbell nebula in Vulpecula are both visible as small red (H-alpha) spots in the high-res version of this scan. The vignetting apparent in this image is an artifact of the wide angle lens and is further  accentuated by some of the processing steps. My next task is to play with rectifying some of the vignetting by processing.