03/12/2019
Astrophotography is hard. Astronomically hard. Everything has to be perfect. Your camera the lenses ,time , location , period of year ,climate and luck . You also must track your target in precise synchronization with the rotation of the Earth. It can't shake. It can't even vibrate. You have to nail your camera's exposure settings or you'll be rewarded with an incoherent mess. Your targets are often so dim you can't even see them until after the image has been made, so focusing is a nightmare.
So why try? Because it makes the entities floating in the vastness of the universe much more real than any wallpaper on your computer desktop can.
Those images, as spectacular as they are, don't capture personal experience. Astrophotographers —for me—is best experienced first-hand. No shot of Saturn, Jupiter, the Orion Nebula, or the Whirlpool Galaxy from the Hubble can equal--intellectually or emotionally--my own experiences at the eyepiece. The scenes, when delivered by nothing more than a few layers of precision-ground glass, are reality. Saturn is an actual object, floating in the blackness of space. Star clusters sparkle like diamonds on black velvet. Everything has scale, depth, and context. They're actual things, not abstractions. And far from making me feel like I'm an insignificant little nothing--or actually feel like I'm part of something spectacular. Capturing images myself would be an extension of that first-person experience. This blog will help to record this vastness of sky and share this mind experiences with all friends.
Astrophotography is a black art of the first order, and, frankly, I suck at it
