My Journey in Space Photography

Before I begin talking about my journey of photographing space I should begin this blog with how I came into photography from the jump. I was in high school at the time and finally received my driver's license after three attempts on the test, I mean who else can parallel park a mini-van in just a couple adjustments? Back to the photography story, my Dad helped me find my first car, a 1999 Eclipse. Dad taught me a lot regarding vehicles and I grew to really love them. I finally drove it to school and found that someone else had the same model car I had! We went on car cruises after school everyday and we soon both decided to get decent cameras to photograph the cars at our favorite locations. Eventually we modified our cars enough to join car events in the area and photographed many other modified cars at the shows. Then came adulthood, we both went to college and started working full-time, so we took a break from the car scene.

{A couple years later}

I was scrolling through Instagram and came across a photo of our closest galaxy (The Andromeda Galaxy). I've never had something inspire me that much in my life to capture an image like that one day. Of course I knew it wasn't going to be easy or cheap to do, so I dusted off the camera and did some research of what I could image with what I currently had. I discovered that I could do wide-field photography of our own galaxy, The Milky Way Galaxy (photo below). I knew I needed to be out of the city light to capture the Milky Way and drove about three hours from home in the dark. After a couple minutes of manually focusing my lens and little knowledge in this hobby I managed to capture a small section of the Milky Way. I was happy with it, except the fact the stars were "trailing" in the photo due to the Earth's rotation. Therefore I drove home and did some research of how to fix this problem. I found a star tracker device that needs pointed to the north star and is able to rotate the same speed as the Earth's rotation. Not only did this help my "star trailing" issue, but I also captured more details in the night sky than I ever thought was possible!

{July 2020}

The year of Comet Neowise. I've been imaging the Milky Way for about a year now and loved every clear night I could get to capture it. I use an app called Sky Guide to help me determine when is best to image the night sky, but within this app I got a notification that a comet was approaching close to Earth and would be visible to the naked eye soon. I was looking at the sky every night to hopefully see it, but later found it was going to take a couple of months to be close to view. It was the night me and the family went to the Cumberland Valley Drive-In when we saw Comet Neowise in the sky, it had a tail extending many miles in space and was one of the best nights in my new hobby. Comet Neowise is the main cause of my financial problems to this date as it really pushed me to dive deeper into space photography, I don't regret any bit of it either.

Starting Deep Space Photography:

At last, I finally saved up just enough for my first telescope, the William Optics Zenithstar 73 with a focal length of 430mm! Although I had to wait months as it was on back-order, probably because of the other people that witnessed the comet. I will say it was worth the wait, I did what any other person would do first, I pointed the telescope directly at the Moon. I was ecstatic to see the Moon up close like that, but to capture deep space objects it is better to image during a new moon as it is a form of light pollution in the sky. I waited for the next new moon, crossed my fingers for a clear night, and researched what object to image first. A couple days went by and I decided to capture a galaxy, the Triangulum Galaxy (M 33). It took a little while to set up my gear, but I finally found the galaxy in my frame after about 30 minutes of manually moving the scope. I went home and looked over the images on my computer, I was relieved I got the galaxy right in the center of the photo. I could have done a better job at focusing it, but it was a great first attempt I thought. I practiced every clear night I could go out and learned a lot of different ways to image from research. I learned that in order to get the best possible image, one must take many long exposure images of the same space object and stack all of them into 1 complete photo. For example, 40 images at 3 minutes each is a total of 2 hours of data which is actually a short amount for deep space photography, but that's how long I did to start. During my journey through space photography I met two other fellow astrophotographers @ramsey.astrophotography (Kolby) and @char32geek (Robert). We occasionally drove to Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania, one of the darkest sky sites in the United States, to setup our telescopes and visually view space with the other telescopes that people bring to the park.

Diving Even Deeper into Space:

I've been imaging deep space for about a full year at this point and felt I have mastered the telescope I had been using. I went on another spending spree and bought a telescope with a focal length of 2,032mm to go deeper into space than ever before, the telescope is a Celestron EdgeHD 8" and it is a beast! Although I am still getting used to it, I love every image I get from it. I can't wait to share the stories of how I use it in my upcoming blogs and what I captured throughout the nights! I hope you enjoy the photos I capture just as much as I do and thank you for reading my short story of how I became an Astrophotographer.