The Inces pages

Astrophotography - taking photos of Astronomical objects - has been an interest of mine since I was at college in Sheffield and studied Astronomy there. I was fascinated both by the science (it was all film based then so reciprocity of films and hypersensitising was the norm) and the art - enjoying the kind of Photos you could see in textbooks or could find in the posters that were fashionable back then.

As Sheffield was so cloudy - much of the course was theoretical and we only got a couple of visual observations in in the whole 3 years, my actual experience started on my own kit. My very first pictures were of constellations taken on 35mm slide film - with my SLR and a 50mm lens on a tripod - with hand timed bulb exposures. If I can find them I'll scan and display here.

Later I  tried some handheld afocal moon shots on my 60mm AltAz department store scope, but they were equally uninspiring. I eventually tried some partial eclipse shots using the SLR set up again - this time with loads of ND filters and crossed polarisers - again uninspiring but it amused me at the time.  

My real interest started to bloom many years later when I eventually bought a decent scope  - my Meade LX90. This allowed me to do some real tracked exposures (all the kit I had had prior had no motor drives). I quickly realised that I would need a wedge and also discovered the web cam phenomenon via the QCUIAG group..

I enjoyed taking pics of the major planets and the moon - these easily were the best and most professional shots I had taken and certainly rivalled those I had seen back in the college days from "real" astronomers terrestrial telescopes and so began to realise that CCD cameras were more accessible and could give fantastic results. 

Since joining QCUIAG and partaking in the discussions and developments there I eventually obtained modified web cams and security cameras that were capable of true long exposures and started to bag some of my own faint fuzzies.

Finally I graduated to a more mainstream cooled CCD camera from SBIG and managed to meet one of my long term desires - to take a picture of the Horsehead nebula in Orion. 

Given that this hobby shows no signs of boring me yet ;o) , I decided to go the whole hog and have built myself a home observatory to make the process so much easier - as the system can stay set-up and can maintain a good polar alignment so essential for long exposures.