Astro 9A/B/C: Projects

My goal is to help you get some nice photos to take home, and have fun doing it. To earn your chosen grade, you have an two options.

(1) You may do the classic standard film-oriented projects listed below. Five 8x10 photos mounted and labelled. If you are just looking for a straight-forward class to earn 1 unit, you may prefer this. (2) You may instead have a firm idea of what you want to learn and new skills you want to master. In this case, you come to me and we'll come up with an agreement of what you will accomplish for your grade. If you do a credible job, you earn your "A". If not, you may take a grade or "CR/NC". I'm quite flexible here. One unit isn't a lot. However, it must entail more than just snapping pictures. You need to either do film developing and printing, or if digital, you must use digital image processing software to generate, and then send to e.g. Bay Photo your digital image(s) for printing and mounting and framing.

Option (1): Classic Black&White Film Categories

They must be submitted as 8x10 or larger prints, mounted on mountboard or framed. The photo must be accompanied with the following information as a bare minimum, on the back of the mounted photo. (a)  Length of the exposure, (b)   f/ ratio and focal length of the lens, (c)   The date the photo was taken, (d)   The type of film used (e.g. T-max 400), (e)   Any special techniques used in the dark room (push-processed? Dodge/burn? Filtering?), (f)    You can also,add a title to the piece, just for artsey fun (e.g. “Cosmic Unconscious”)

1.      Star Trails. A tripod picture, unguided, showing the movement of the stars. This will require an exposure of at least 10-15 minutes to get good trailing. Can be in any sky direction that makes artistic sense.

2.     Sky + Foreground. Most astrophotos are much more interesting if they include the foreground; trees, hillsides, people, observatory domes… things that give a sense of place and help tell a story. The Foreground must not be trailed. That means if you’re doing a long guided exposure, you’ll need to do a sandwich with two negatives; one of the scene without guiding, and one guided. One will show a deep photo of the star fields, and the other a nice sharp foreground. If this is beyond your skill level, you can always just use fast film, like T-max 3200, and take a picture lasting less than a minute and you’ll still get a good number of fairly round stars and an untrailed foreground.

3.     Guided. Take a photograph which tracks the stars. This should be at least 5 minutes long, and (better) 10-30 minutes long (need a very dark moonless sky to go long). This will require piggy back mounting on a telescope, or (easier) using the GM-8 mount. The GM-8 mount is capable of taking very good guided pictures without you having to do guiding corrections by hand. Your best guided picture opportunity will happen at the optional dark-sky field trip, where we’ll have all night long under very dark skies. But, you can still do things at the observatory.

4.     The Moon. Your moon picture must be taken through the telescope. On class nights when the moon is up, we’ll have a telescope out and I’ll help you get your camera mated to the telescope so you can do your pictures. These pictures will be fast… realize that the moon is just a normal daylit scene. You won’t be taking time exposures, but instead just a snapshot. For T-max 400 film, a typical exposure on our 10” f/10 telescope at prime focus will be about 1/60 of a second. If you have a very long telephoto lens (1000 mm) then ask me if you could do your moon picture with your lens instead of the telescope. What we don’t want is a moon picture where the moon is a little teeny tiny white spot in the middle of a vast, empty gray sky. This is what you’ll get if you just use your regular lenses and a tripod.

5.     Special Effect. This is a photo which is clearly not “realistic”, but has some interesting and bizarre aspect to what was captured. Sometimes, students end up with interesting special effect shots by just goofing up some other picture they tried to take. The possibilities are endless – you trip over your tripod at mid-exposure, someone runs across your foreground picture with their flashlight… go hog wild! I don’t want to constrain your imagination or creativity, so go for something really cool. The main requirement here is that when you present it, the class will think – “that’s cool! How did you do that?”, rather than “Yow. Too bad that shot got muffed”. So, don’t just turn in an uninterestingly bad picture, turn in something that’ll bring a smile!

Option (2): Your Very Own Special Projects

Digital Imaging Digital images will be taken with our the Astro Department's own cameras, for the most part (unless you have your own astro-capable digital camera - not the usual consumer digital cameras). You'll take a series of digital images, and process and stack them together, then use Photoshop (on our machines) or some other software you like to put them into final form. Then print an 8x10 and frame it. You should think of a variety of subjects requiring a variety of equipment. You must turn in an 8x10" framed in glass color image, and you need to send me an email with a .jpg of the photograph attached to the email, so I can post it to the gallery page here.

Galaxies: A beautiful spiral like the Whirlpool or edge-on like NGC 891 would be nice. Perhaps a bright supernova in a spiral will happen this semester and make the image special. This is high-magnification work and except for a few large galaxies, will require our 12" LX200 scope under the dome, and the ST7 camera. Exception - the Andromeda Galaxy is perfectly placed and so huge that a great picture can be taken with our ST2000XCM (like found on this page) on the portable scopes.

Planetary Nebulae: These ghostly rings of colorful interstellar gas are small, and require high magnification. Best done on the 12" LX200 under the dome, at the observatory.

Star Clusters, Colorful Emission Nebulae: These are all through the Fall Milky Way and make beautiful subjects. Large enough that they are optimal subjects for the single-shot color ST2000XCM and the wide-field portable telescopes (Megrez refractor, Meade 8" LXD75). It's a favorite subject of mine. Using the equipment you'll be using, I've gotten some nice shots - see here.

Panoramic Milky Way: We can hook a normal camera lens to our ST2000XCM camera and get up to about 15 degrees field of view - perfect for getting an entire constellation or photographing the star clouds and dark dust lanes of the Fall MilkyWay. We have 24mm, 50mm, and 100mm lenses.

Moon: Can be done with either the 12" for super-high close up, or with the ST2000XCM to get the whole moon, perhaps with a bright companion object like a star nearby.

Planets: Planets are not ideally placed this semester. If you wait till dawn on our optional field trip, we could help you get Saturn with the 8" LX200 and the camcorder. If you hurry, on the first night of class we might be able to get a (crummy) picture of Jupiter low in the southwest. Mars will make a fine subject late November. Planets require taking video footage and then selecting/stacking the best of a large series of frames. The Meade LPI might also be a good choice of instrument. Astro clubber's Shahram and Chris Kitting are experienced with this; check their gallery page links.

Internet Telescope Imaging!

There is a new opportunity for getting some nice images. Science film maker Timothy Ferris has just completed the TV series "Seeing in the Dark", on amateur astronomy. As part of this program his team has arranged for students in the U.S. to have free access to request images from an internet-controlled telescope on a mountaintop in New Mexico. Go here to register and request an image.

Choosing Interesting Astronomical Subjects...

For starters, go to the web, google search terms like "best deep sky objects", "brightest nebulae", etc. Try and find objects which previous classes have not done before. The Messier Catalog is a catalog of most of the 100 brightest deep sky objects. Make sure your objects fit the field of view of the camera and telescope combinatioin you're using. There's a calculator here. Here's the results, in arcminutes ( ' ) for our equipment...