The equipment needed for this type of photography is any camera whose shutter can be locked open for about 10 seconds, a tripod and a locking cable release (will be needed for this and many of the projects to be described in future articles).

Photographing the relatively bright stars that delineate most constellations is relatively easy. If the exposure is too long, two things can happen. One is, you begin to get star trails instead of pinpoint stars due to the Earth’s rotation. The other is, you would record so many stars that it would be difficult to pick out the constellation stars. For a tripod-mounted camera, exposure time should not exceed 10 seconds for a lens around 50mm and 15 seconds for 35mm lenses. Lens aperture should be set at between f/2 and f/2.8 or the lowest f/setting on your lens. Using a cable release to open the shutter prevents camera vibration and is a must for long exposure photographs. Just about any film can be used for this type of photography with speeds of between 200 and 1000 being the norm.

So, let’s take our first constellation photograph. Most constellations will fit in the field of a 50mm lens but a few would require a wider angle 35mm or 28mm lens. With your camera on a tripod or other solid support, frame the constellation as you would like it to appear. Set the lens to infinity and either wide open or stopped down one stop (e.g., from say f/1.4 to f/2) if sharper star images at the corners are desired. Don’t stop your lens down more than this or many stars may not be recorded. Now, open the shutter for a slow count of ten then close it. Your first constellation has now been captured. It is always a good idea to experiment with different exposure times and lens settings for a given film and location to optimize the results to your taste. When you take the film in for processing, be sure to indicate to “print all frames” or, if slides, “mount all frames” since these frames look blank to the person doing the processing. Also, take a few normal shots at the beginning of the roll so that the film cutter has a clear border to register on.

Another bonus to this type of photography is that today’s modern color films are capable of recording the colors of most stars. A photograph of the constellation of Orion shows the orange color of Betelgeuse, the blue color of Rigel and the pink color of the Orion nebula (M42) in the sword of Orion. Other star colors are also quite apparent. As you acquire your constellation collection, bring the photos to our meetings to share with the group. Most importantly, have fun!

As kids, many of us experimented with a magnifying glass using it to focus the image of the sun and thus concentrated the sun’s rays to produce a spot image having intense heat (primarily produced by the mostly invisible infrared rays) sufficient to ignite a piece of paper or fry an ant. Imagine what would happen of that focused image fell on a piece of film in your camera or on the retina of your eye!

The invisible high energy ultraviolet radiation could also cause permanent damage to your eye unless proper filtration is used. Using the wrong type of filter to observe the sun could allow this radiation to pass through and cause eye damage even though the intense visible rays from the sun are reduced to a comfortable level. For these reasons, a safe solar filter must be employed to reduce the harmful radiation from the sun and allow for reasonable exposure times and comfortable viewing.

Solar filters from Thousand Oaks Optical, Baader, Orion and others are of either glass or Mylar designed specifically for solar use. If you own a name brand telescope, custom filters designed to fit over the front end of the main tube are available. Schmidt Cassegrain and Newtonian reflecting scopes may employ a full aperture or an off axis type of filter. These “visual” solar filters allow you to observe and photograph the sun safely and take advantage of the high resolution that your telescope provides. Never use solar filters that are designed to be used at the eyepiece end of the telescope! A decade or so ago, these eyepiece solar filters were commonly included with many department store and imported refractor telescopes and there were many horror stories of these filters cracking from the intense heat of the focused sun while someone was looking through the eyepiece! If you have one of these filters, destroy it!

To obtain photographs of the sun that show any sunspots to good effect, a focal length of at least 1000mm (equivalent to 20X) must be used. Due to atmospheric limitations, you gain very little using telescopes having apertures over 4-inches. For more detail, higher magnifications must be employed and are usually achieved by using barlow or eyepiece projection techniques. A means to attach your cameras to the telescope where the eyepiece is usually located makes this and other types of photography most convenient. Your camera, however, must be one that the lens can be removed and replaced by this adapter. Get an adapter that also accepts eyepieces so projection photography may also be employed. Many astronomical supply companies sell these adapters for very reasonable prices. If your camera does not have a removable lens but is a reflex camera (allows you to view and focus through the lens), an afocal method can be employed where the camera is mounted on a tripod and the image of the sun projected into the camera lens which is set wide open and at infinity. The image is then observed through the camera and focused using the telescope.

The best film for solar photography is slow black and white film. The very best in this category is Kodak’s Technical Pan 2415. For the beginner, however, slow color film may also be used. It is not important whether you use slide or print film but stick to speeds of ASA100 or less to get the contrast necessary to record sunspots well.

Most solar filters produce an orange or bluish image (Mylar-type). The Baader filter material produces a more normal white image but you will have to make your own filter cell as the Mylar-type material is all that is available. Most prefer the light orange color as produced by the Thousand Oaks and others.

Since exposure times are usually quite short, you do not need a tracking mount, however, having to reposition, focus and shoot in a short period of time can be a nuisance. If your camera has through the lens metering, then start with that exposure and bracket one or two stops on either side of it. Use a cable release or the timer on your camera to make the exposures and minimize vibrations. Keep good notes so that bracketing will not be necessary once you know the best exposure for the different lens systems and films you employ. Many of the techniques you use for solar photography will apply directly to Lunar and planetary photography to be covered in a later article. The best advice is to just get out and do it. Learn from your mistakes and before long, you will be producing high quality images of the sun to be proud of.

I’m almost three years old and I live in San Luis Obispo in a nice cool, dust tight enclosure most of the time. The guy that takes care of me (his name is Tom) takes me out for a monthly viewing of the stars at the Santa Margarita KOA with my friends and occasionally to Red Hill Road off of Hwy 58 where the view is truly spectacular. There are lots of other friendly scopes and owners at these gigs.

A little background on how I wound up in SLO: My predecessor was a 4.5” RFT that Tom made for his daughter, Angie, in the early 1980’s. Tom and Angie subsequently accompanied Lee Coombs, Jim Carlisle and others in CCAS to the RTMC in the 80’s. There, both Angie and Tom developed a severe case of aperture fever and realized that the 4.5” RFT was only the beginning. Angie decided to build a 10” Dobsonian out of oak-veneered plywood for her high school senior project with the help of Lee Coombs and her dad. She took this to RTMC and got honorable mention for her first telescope. As daughters move on with their lives, Angie moved on with her telescope leaving Tom with, you guessed it, the 4.5” RFT. During the many trips to RTMC, Tom developed a fascination for the truss tube Dobs that were being exhibited. But it was Pete Roebber that pushed him over the edge in 2002. One evening with Pete and his 18” Obsession
(a distant relative) at the KOA site convinced Tom that this was to be the next topic of discussion over dinner with Norma. “Uh dear…”. So I appeared on the scene in October 2002.

My friends and I do our best to provide exceedingly clear images of deep sky objects; the globular clusters, galaxies and, along with my associate the OIII filter, nebulas like Orion and the Veil. My best memories include showing folks these wonderful objects in the sky, and especially youngsters who have never looked through a telescope and hearing the “Wow…Helen come look at this” or “you mean all of those white dots are stars?”

Well, if this were “Inside the Actor’s Studio”, James Lipton would be asking me a variety of questions from carefully scripted 3×5 index cards. He might ask something like the following. What is/are your:

Favorite Eyepiece: Good ol’ Mr. 17mm Nagler
Favorite Deep Sky Object: Without a doubt, M42, the Orion Nebula; makes my truss tubes tremble.
Turn On: Dark sky locale where you can’t see your feet,
Turn Off: White flash lights at star parties and dust
Greatest goal: A Messier Marathon at Glacier Point
Your favorite curse word: Oh Firi ( Fog is rolling in)

And, if you could change yourself for the better you would…

Latch onto a ServoCat (go-to system for Dobs) so I could follow the stars..no hands

There are well over a thousand of us now. And my creator, Dave Kriege, a dentist in Wisconsin has started assembling 12.5” and 15” models. You can learn more about us HERE. Don’t forget the word “telescope” in the address. Tom had an embarrassing moment when…Oh well.

So please come visit Tom and me at the KOA campground. We’d love to show you around the sky.

My name is Ryan, or perhaps more commonly known as “that guy over there with the Coronado PST,” and I currently live in Templeton. Beyond amateur astronomy I’m an avid student of philosophy (have nearly completed my BA in philosophy from Cal Poly) and the martial art of Aikido (just in case a wild animal attacks while I’m hunched over the eyepiece).

Like many I’ve had a lifelong feeling of wonder and awe at the profound beauty of the night sky, but it only occurred to me about four years ago to buy my first telescope. I started my journey then with what at the time seemed to me a massive 10” Dobsonian, which much to my parent’s horror lived where else but in the living room.

On my first night out I was enthralled by the incredible beauty of the stars I could see through it, and marveled at what I thought to be only a regular cloud in the sky blocking my view of four little stars in Orion. Oddly enough all these years later that “cloud” is still there, but fortunately so is my great love for the majesty of the universe. In that time my telescope collection has expanded, the most recent addition being my home made 16” truss Dobsonian telescope built around a Meade primary mirror, which had its first public appearance at September’s star party. The planning and building process ended up taking me about a year’s worth of sporadic work to complete. It was one of those projects that seem easy on paper, but not quite so easy in practice as I labored during hot summer days trying to make square cuts and racing to align parts as glue dried.

During its construction I had often wondered if it was really all worth it, but that wondering came to an abrupt end last winter with the telescope’s first light. Appropriately enough the first deep sky object I pointed the telescope to was the first I had ever observed, that same little persistent cloud more commonly known as the Great Orion Nebula. It was one of those observing experiences you will never forget, made all the better knowing that I was seeing it through a telescope built by my own hands.

Despite having bought and sold many telescopes over the few years I’ve been in this hobby (a bit of an equipment addict), I know the 16” will be one that I will keep for a lifetime. My passion for astronomy has only continued to grow and I’ve recently begun to explore solar H-alpha viewing with my PST, as well as getting into astrophotography. Anyway, so there is a little about myself and my telescopes, I look forward to meeting and sharing the night sky (oh, and even day sky with the solar scope!) with the rest of you in the future.

Clear Skies,
Ryan Koch

There was a group working on mirrors in the basement of Griffith Observatory which I attended once or twice when I was at Berendo Jr. High. I don’t think I followed through with that group, as Mother moved a lot. However, I purchased Allyn Thompson’s Making Your Own Telescope. For the next several years I dreamed about and worked on that project, grinding and polishing my own 8 inch mirror. I decided to build a fiberglass tube for it. What a mess! I was in Whittier, next to a refinery. You couldn’t see a star in the sky. I tried to find a star with my home made telescope. Instead, I pushed my eyepiece through the telescope, and heard it hit the glass. Kerplunk! My heart sunk. I had it professionally refigured and aluminized again. But I don’t think I ever had it in a telescope that I could see a star with it.

My mirror making career was a failure, but I was determined to make my own telescope. Finally, I bought a 13″ Odyssey Dobsonion which had glorious views. Prisoners at Soledad later helped me machine a unique telescope mount for my ill-fated fiberglassed/homemade mirror telescope. This unique one armed fork mount was the first of its type, and won a prize at the Riverside Telescope Makers conference. But I never really tried the optics in it.

Not having learned to avoid fiberglass, I made a black one, for a Jaegers 6″ objective. This ridiculous telescope ended up being published in Peter Manly’s book Unusual Telescopes (1991, Cambridge University Press).

About the same year as that picture was published, I received a patent on the telescope that I am most proud of, my Newtonian Binocular telescope, which is a revision of Sir John Herschell’s (son of William Herschell) invention. It is two Newtonian telescopes put together in such a way as to allow the viewer to comfortably view the sky as he/she would with a regular Newtonian. The modification was in the configuration which allowed comfortable access to Zenith regions of the sky, which was not possible with Sir John Herschell’s telescope. [See Patentedbinoscope.jpg] This won an RTMC award as well. It was covered in Astronomy Magazine, as one of the finest views of the sky for that year (1991). It was very portable for a large (10″) binocular.

During the same period, I built a telescope out of foam board. It was one of the easiest to use and most portable. I think it was the first telescope I ever saw made out of this material. Tom Frey recalls the time we took it to RTMC, and I accidentally broke off the secondary spider while travelling in his van during a stop. While travelling the back roads–at night–I was in the back of the bouncing van taping it back together. When we got to RTMC, I pulled it out of the van, and pointed it at the stars. They were pinpoints of light! Tom was floored. He has never forgotten that experience.

My last homemade telescope was a giant 17.5″ binocular, which I managed to get to a viewing at the Monthly star party. The view of Lagoon Nebula through it was fabulous.

My Wife, Pat, suggested that I clean up the garage of my telescope making stuff, and buy a nice high tech scope. I only heard “buy a nice high tech telescope.” I found an RCX 400 and later built a pier. Lee and my neighbor, Jim, helped me place it on the pier. I now remotely control it from the house, and have enjoyed the honor of doing some actual exoplanet research with it, with Tom Smith, Russ Genet, Jolyon Johnson. I cover the scope with a telescope cover and with the umbrella shown in the background. I prefer this arrangement to a shed, to lessen the daytime heat. Also, the view is not obstructed by a building.

My story is one of many failures, with a few successes. But I think my boyhood experience with the $2 lenses and cardboard tube is what hooked me.

I wasn’t born in a telescope, but from our ranch in Yucaipa, California, we could see the morning sun glinting off the domes of both the 48- and 200-inch telescopes on Mt. Palomar. I spent a month every summer with my grandparents who lived at the foot of Mt. Wilson. We often picnicked on the observatory grounds near the 60- and 100-inch telescopes.

My first scientific instrument was a microscope—a gift on my eighth birthday. Within hours I had removed the microscope’s eyepiece, borrowed my grandmother’s stamp-collecting magnifying glass, scrounged up a Quaker Oats box and, voila, my first telescope! The chromatic aberration was terrible but, along with the other neighborhood kids, I could see craters on the moon and even the moons of Jupiter. As a young teenager, I went one step further, buying a 3-inch objective lens from Jaegers which I assembled into a stovepipe telescope with a plumbing pipe mount. I soon discovered airplanes, rockets, and girls, however, and that was the end of telescopes until I was nearly forty (1979).

My last semester of graduate school was a bit slow, so I decided to try my hand at some personally-funded scientific research. I chose observational astronomy as an area where small dollars could still fund real research. Looking through five years of the Astronomical Journal to find observational projects that I figured I could have done myself, I found some 30 possibilities. Of these, 28 were photometric observations of variable stars. Drawing the obvious conclusion, I quickly ordered a 10-inch Cass mirror set, a 1P21 photomultiplier tube, and one of the first Radio Shack TRS-80 microcomputers. Within a couple of months the telescope, photometer, and observatory were assembled, and observations were being reduced on the microcomputer. Out popped my first light curve.

The problem with observational science was, I soon discovered, that it took several hours most every night out in the cold making boring, repetitive measurements. The fun part for me was studying the light curves, trying to discover what the stars were really doing. The answer, of course, was to have the microcomputer control the photometer, perhaps the telescope and, ideally, the entire observatory. This took some doing, but with some help from my friends the entire process was automated by 1983. Since then, I have designed or been involved with many robotic telescopes, including a couple of 1-meter telescopes.

Looking back over 50 years of telescopes, I can now say that my first telescope—the Quaker Oats Scope—was my favorite. I can still remember the excitement when the neighborhood kids gathered around, we first pointed it at the moon, and, to our total astonishment, saw craters. Telescopes have always been special to me—right up there with airplanes, rockets, and women.

Part 2

My first Quaker Oats Box telescope remains my favorite, as described last month, while my fifth telescope, the Fairborn-10, holds my record for productivity—now having automatically made photometric measurements of variable stars every clear night from an Arizona mountaintop for over two decades. Nonetheless, I am now faithfully devoted to my current telescope, a Meade classic LX-200 equipped with a Santa Barbara Instruments Group ST7 CCD camera, a high-precision CNS Systems clock, and a Dell computer with a Maxtor 200 gigabyte external hard drive. This observational system, the Orion Observatory (OO), is housed in a small tilt-off-roof enclosure that looks like a small “two-holer” outhouse when the roof is closed. Appearances notwithstanding, “OO” does not stand for the Outhouse Observatory, thank you very much.

Located just one mile from Santa Margarita Lake and some 20 miles inland from the costal ocean fogs, the Orion Observatory is blessed with clear skies most every night between April and November. As the first stars come out, I tilt off the roof and power up the equipment. The Sky moves my telescope to the night’s eclipsing binary, and I use CCD Soft to place the system in autoguide. Without another astronomical thought, I move on to other things. All this takes less than five minutes. Throughout the evening and night, the system—tracking a binary—automatically takes hundreds of one-minute CCD camera exposures, about 700 megabytes worth of data by morning when the system shuts itself off on reaching a western limit switch. It thus avoids an embarrassing cable wrap-up should I sleep in. Before breakfast I take all of two minutes to power the system down, shut the doors, and close the roof.

The real work, being done with Tom Smith at the Dark Ridge Observatory where similar observations are being made, is the reduction and analysis of our voluminous data. We are both observing short-period W UMa-type eclipsing binaries. With rotational periods of only six hours or so, we are able to obtain complete light curves every night. These are being analyzed for changes in shape due to migrating star spots, and for small changes in eclipse timings caused by mass exchange between the two stars or, if periodic, due to a Jupiter-sized planet in orbit around the binary. Although over fifty years have now passed since my first telescope, I’ve never lost interest in what, with a bit of persistence and work, these captivating instruments can reveal about the universe we live in.

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After graduating in 1970, I took a teaching position at Cal Poly. About a year later, I ordered my “dream” instrument from Cave Optical Co., a 10-inch f/5 Newtonian on a clock driven, equatorial mount. The first two or three years I used the instrument visually during which time I moved from San Luis Obispo to Los Osos. Having my own house, I then planned to build an observatory and pursue my astrophotography dream. The mounting that the telescope came with was fine for visual work but was not beefy enough for serious photographic work.

As luck would have it, Cal Poly was in the process of replacing the old Cave Astrola observatory mount, which was used with their 12.5-inch f/8 Newtonian, with a new Byers mount to be used with a 12-inch Cassigrain. They planned to just junk the old mount which had seen many years of use (and abuse). I asked if I could use it and they were thrilled to give it to me just to get it off their hands! I spent some time fixing it up as well as I could and turning it into a very serviceable astrophotographic mount. So began my entry into the world of astrophotography. I am still using the same telescope and mount for my work and have continued to modify and improve my system to fine tune it in an attempt to get the best results that my equipment can deliver.

Even after more than 30 years of doing photography, my results are still improving and I have no plans to get another instrument since I feel I have yet to realize the full potential of what I already have. Over the years, I have had over 900 photos published in various astronomy magazines and books that have been taken with my 10-inch Newtonian. It has served my interests well and I look forward to many more years of use.

My first, last, and present telescope is an Orion 8” Newtonian on an motor-driven equatorial mount. A modest first-time set-up of eighty pounds. I enjoy using a laser-sighting pointer instead of the finderscope, and I am very attached to a 17 mm Lanthanum Superwide eyepiece. As I am permanently embedded in educating the public, I find myself using my telescope just as much during daylight hours as nighttime, so the solar filter gets quite the workout. (I was initially hesitant about pointing a black telescope at the sun for eight hours during open-air events, but no problems have yet arisen!) For star parties and solo nighttime work, I find a polarizing filter for lunar observing and an O-III filter for planetary nebulae rounds out my equipment case nicely.

Enough about the equipment. What have I actually done with it? One of my first times out, I found a peaceful pasture with no fences (eighty pounds to heft, remember?), so I pulled over. I was going solo with no escort that night, and I courageously set to work. As I was working to align the telescope, I was so involved with my task so that I didn’t notice who had slowly crept upon me… a herd of cows. Not one cow, but maybe twenty of them. Surrounding me and my telescope. (Only at the time I hadn’t yet realized they were cows and had quickly abandoned my telescope with a yell and a mad dash for the car.) Thankfully, stampeding had not crossed their minds that night.

Most of my public education adventures have been during daylight hours. What a new experience it is to see the faces of my audience! I try to schedule for days with the sun and moon high in the sky, for added interest. You would not believe how many people will insist that the moon only comes out at night; only to glance upward and resume a sheepish look and a “well, that’s what I was told” attitude. When did we stop thinking for ourselves?

My telescope is a friend, a highly polished tool for inspiring young minds. Wielding it to its utmost oooh-ahhh capability allows me to stretch the imaginations and cultivate the curiosities across generations, from grandma to preschooler.

As a rocket scientist used to blowing things up myself, it has taken a lesson or two in patience to just watch things blow up from a distance. I look forward to many more nights and days of exploration and learning, both from my audience and the telescope.