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Hello, my name is Joel Gonzalez and welcome to my website. This website is dedicated to the art of astrophotography. I will be the first one to tell you that I don't do this hobby justice. From my experience I have found that quite literally the sky is the limit when it comes to astrophotography.  The inherent difficultness of astrophotography would imply that expensive equipment is needed to achieve good results. Ultimately, how much you end up spending depends on how far you want to go with this hobby. Nevertheless, I have discovered that it is possible to take stunningly beautiful pictures of celestial objects with very modest equipment.

Before I get ahead of myself I would like to share how I got into this hobby. At age fourteen I was given a used Jason refractor (800mm focal length) with a chipped main lens by my aunt. My aunt saw how intrigued I was with the thing and just gave it to me. I spent countless hours star gazing with my small telescope and also started delving into astrophotography with an old Fujica ST-701 35mm SLR camera. I had no motorized mount at the time so all of my astrophotos were of star trails. Nevertheless, these early exercises taught me a great deal about photography in general and the effects of exposure times in particular.

Fast forward to present. I had a fourteen year hiatus from astronomy, but around early December 2006 I purchased a Meade DS-2114ATS-TC reflector. The primary reason behind this purchase was renewed dreams of astrophotography. This telescope is very affordable for the beginner and although there might be some reviews for it out there that are less than satisfactory, so far I have been very satisfied with my purchase. Within its "capabilities" this telescope performs very well, and I think this is a very important point.

First Astrophotography Attempts

I began my first astrophotography attempts using the DS114 telescope and the very same 35mm camera I used fourteen years ago. I purchased a Meade camera adaptor and preceded to take numerous photos all of which were unsuccessful. Needless to say, I was very disappointed. I was having numerous problems from focusing issues, exposure time issues, to motorized mount tracking issues. If you experience problems with any of these you will not get good results. Well, I was having problems with all of them and then some!

Then I began to come across numerous websites where others were using webcams and special software with astounding results. I modified an old Creative webcam so it would attach to the focal tube of my telescope and tried my luck with this new approach. I had some initial success with photographing the Moon and Saturn, albeit not great success. The most important lesson I learned from this early testing was that by using a webcam and software it is possible to control star trailing to a certain extent. With my 35mm camera any movement of the telescope while the shutter was open translated into a hideous star trail which was additive so long as the shutter stayed open. On the other hand, with a webcam and software one can take many shorter exposures and then integrate them via software minimizing star trailing to a great degree.

I then came across the great work done by Martin Burri on the Logitech QuckCam Pro 3000. Martin was able to modify this webcam for long exposures by using a similar technique invented by Steve Chambers and his colleagues at QCUAG. I immediately purchased one of these webcams from eBay and performed the long exposure modification by following Martin's directions found here.

The results of the long exposure modification to the Logitech QC Pro 3000 webcam can be seen right here on this page. The first image above is of M42 & M43 better known as The Great Orion Nebula. The photograph was created by allowing the webcam to capture 15 images at 30 seconds per exposure using the excellent astrophotography software written by Peter Katreniak, K3CCDTools. The second image above is of the super bright star Sirius. This beautiful picture of Sirius was captured with the same setup using a 5 second exposure time and a total image count of 20.

I have recently purchased a used Meade DSI Pro monochrome camera from eBay. As effective as the Logitech QC Pro 3000 is with the long exposure modification, it's still not very sensitive. Basically, the exposure times needed to bring out detail in some deep sky objects can become problematic at times. Things like a poorly aligned polar mount, amp glow and noise tend to put a limit on how long of an expose one can take. The more sensitive the camera is the more one can limit all of the above effects because exposure times can be reduced. This is the main reason for my purchasing of the Meade DSI Pro, and of course the fact that this camera is 16 bit doesn't hurt either.