FILM ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY

Most astrophotography today is done with ccd cameras and automatic star tracking devices. I am a member of the old school, regular off the shelf film and a 35mm SLR camera. The first section below deals with Piggyback photography, a camera mounted on top of my Celstar C8 telescope. The scope is motor driven at the same speed as the stars move across the sky allowing long exposures with no streaks as you would have with a fixed tripod. The second section has images taken with the same camera mounted directly to the scope. This arrangement is referred to as Prime Focus.

My equipement for piggyback is a Pentax SP 500 SLR camera. It has a 50mm f/1.9 lens but rather than use it wide open I step down one stop to f/2.8. For widefield star images this helps to decrease viginetting or out of focus stars near the edge of the frame.It is not dependent on batteries for extended exposures and I use a cable release to trip the shutter to avoid any shaking to eliminate blurred images.

The piggyback images are Widefield, that is they are of a large section of the sky. I tried to capture constellations in each shot but in some cases the larger constellations were too big for the 50mm lens. For those a 35mm or 28mm wideangle lens would have been better. If I ever become satisfied with my results I will have to purchase a wideangle lens. There are numerous websites that describe the basic methods I use. Do a web search for astrophotography to get some tips. There are many types of images you can make with just a camera and a regular tripod.

All of the Widefield shots were taken with Fuji Superia 800 ASA for eight minutes. They were developed at Walmart's one hour photolab per my instructions. I then scanned them with a HP 3200c scanner, cropped them in Corel Photohouse, resized, sharpened, converted to greyscale using IrfanView v3.33. The constellation lines were made using Adobe Photoshop 5.0. The Moon photos were taken with Kodak Gold 200 and processed as above.