Quote from: Pema on Yesterday at 06:54:04 PM@KathyLauren, I'd love to know more about how you got into astrophotography. If you've already written about it here, please feel free to point me to an existing post(s). And no rush; I have plenty of time (or so I believe).
Thank you.
I have always been interested in astronomy, since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I have heard an audio tape of me, at age 4 or thereabouts (yes they had audio tape way back then), talking about the Sun and planets. However, as I learned more about astronomy, the one thing that stood out is that you can't really see the good stuff just by looking through a telescope. I knew that I needed to do astrophotography to see the really interesting objects.
I didn't really act on that until, in my 50s, I was living in a truly dark place, an island off the west coast of BC. There was a tiny bit of light pollution from Vancouver, 100 km or so away, but not much else. And I had just received an inheritance, so I could afford some decent equipment.
Pretty soon, I was out in the yard every clear night, freezing my butt off and taking pictures. Digital photography had revolutionized astrophotography, and it was possible for an amateur to get really good pictures.
When we moved to Nova Scotia (because my wife was born here and Nova Scotians are like salmon: they have to return to their place of birth), I insisted that we move to somewhere with dark skies, and that I would build an observatory. We have moved twice since then, still within NS, and each time, i had the observatory picked up and moved to the new location.
As I got more proficient, I upgraded my equipment. So, instead of a DSLR, I now use a dedicated astronomy camera, with filters for the primary colours and for some common chemical elements that are found in nebulae. There is no shortage of interesting targets out there. I have tried more and more challenging targets. The dimmest target I have imaged to date took about 24 hours of exposure time.
