THREE RIVERS
OBSERVATORY
BOX 341
THREE RIVERS CALIFORNIA 93271
knstars@aol.com
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THE THREE RIVERS OBSERVATORY BOX 341 THREE RIVERS CALIFORNIA 93271 knstars@aol.com |
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The Photographer I'm originally from Detroit, and after graduating from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering, I moved to Colorado Springs in 1984. After 11 years of developing astrodynamics software, the DoD market stagnated, and I went into the Telecommunications industry. I'm now at a new job (less than a year) with a start-up e-commerce software company. My very patient wife, Nancy, and I have been married for 6 1/2 years, and she likes to stargaze while wrapped in a blanket in front of campfire coals. I dabbled with binoculars as a kid, continued to do so as an adult, and was messing around with a C5 on a flimsy tripod before I first tried astrophotography. My first two attempts; Comet Hyakutake from a fixed tripod, and Hale-Bopp from a hand-operated, homebuilt, two-arm tangent drive (barndoor); were successful enough to get me hooked. In mid-1998 I bought the scope and mount described below, and I've been adding camera bodies, lenses, and other goodies as often as the budget allows. After many learning experiences (mistakes, frustration, and wasted film), I achieved my first really decent astrophoto with this equipment in July of 1999 (M8 & M20), and now I'm hopelessly addicted. I now find myself wishing for an instrument of 900-1100mm focal length. The Equipment Most of the photos were taken with a Nikon FM2n mounted at the prime focus of a Takahashi Epsilon 160mm Hyperbolic Astrograph. This instrument is basically a Newtonian reflector with a hyperbolic primary mirror, and a Ross-type corrector lens inside the focuser. The instrument is very fast, at f/3.3, and I think I usually expose longer than I have to. The focuser is a magnificent piece of engineering, silky smooth yet big and beefy, and it rotates 360 degrees without losing focus. The camera is mounted to the focuser via a threaded "wide-mount" T-adapter that is both very solid and wide enough to prevent any vignetting. I guide my astrophotos manually with a Takahashi FC60 refractor and a Tak 5mm guiding eyepiece. The guidescope sits inside 90mm Losmandy rings on top of the Epsilon in Parallax rings, all on top of a Losmandy G-11 mount. I normally use a side-by-side arrangement with the Epsilon and guidescope on one side, and two piggyback cameras on the other side, both mounted on a single Losmandy Universal Plate. I use a Nikon F3HP with DW-4 6x magnifying finder mounted on a big Bogen tripod head for wide angle shots, or shots where I want to aim at something other than what the Epsilon in aiming at. I also use a Nikon FM10 with a Nikkor 135mm f/2 AIS lens as the other piggyback camera. The FM10 is mounted on a 90mm ring base, and the lens is held in place separately by the ring itself. This arrangement works very well to eliminate flexure with the heavy 135mm lens. All photos were scanned with a Polaroid SprintScan 4000 film scanner. They were subsequently enhanced in Picture Window 2.5 Pro. Not much other than brightness and color saturation were modified. All photos are single exposures; I haven't really collected enough images to master compositing yet.
The Photo Locations Even though my backyard in Colorado Springs is pretty dark for an essentially suburban location, and pretty high up at about 6350 feet, I usually travel west of town to get to some really dark sites for astrophotography. I think having access to such dark sites is one reason why I can expose as long as I do without ruining the shot. Even so, I'm planning on cutting down on exposure times in the future and experimenting with stacking multiple images of shorter duration.
The Photographs 
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