CELESTIAL
cel-les-tial
(se-LES-chel) adj. heavenly, divine; of the sky, as
defined by Webster. My most recent foray into the world of imagery
involves the growing art of amateur CCD imaging. Using a special camera
containing a CCD (charged coupled device) attached to a telescope, I can
take digital photographs of the many thousands of celestial objects found
in the night sky. The moon, planets, and other objects in the solar
system are within easy reach, as are faint gaseous nebula and even galaxies
far outside our own Milky Way. Many of these objects are far too
faint to be seen with the naked eye, but are within easy reach of amateur
CCD cameras. My CCD camera of choice is a PixCel
237 manufactured for Celestron by SBIG. It is coupled to a Celestron
Celestar Fastar compatible 8 inch Schmidt Cassegrain
telescope. This instrument allows very wide field views of the heavens
when used with the PixCel 237. In special configurations, this telescope
can image at f 1.95 providing exposures generally measured only in minutes
or seconds. My mount and tracking platform is an Astro-Physics
AP900 GTO German equatorial. This equipment is permanently housed at
Darklight
Observatory. Although the AP900 mount does allow longer
unguided exposures than a standard fork mount, any mount sufficiently aligned
on the pole or guided with a separate guide scope can be used to obtain
Fastar images exactly like those in my galleries. My "stock" exposure
length is only 120 seconds long. The magic of SBIG's Track and Accumulate
function, coupled with the phenominal "speed" of the Fastar, makes imagery
like mine easy to obtain.
Click on an image
below to enter that gallery.
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