My interest in astronomy goes back to when I was twelve years old and my uncle bought my brother and I a Edmund Scientific 4 1/4" reflector telescope.  The three of us had great times exploring the moon, Saturn, Jupiter and many deep sky objects with that little telescope.   Over the years I've acquired larger and more expensive telescopes, but none any more fun than that original 4 1/4" reflector.  Almost all of the images presented here were taken using either a Takahashi FS 128 or Sky 90 Refractor, WO 80mm f/6 with Lomo triplet, Celestron 8" SCT or a Cave 10" Newtonian Reflector.  Most of the Solar System images were imaged through the telescopes with a Astrovid 2000, a  Atik 1HS-II, a DMK 21AU04 or a Lumenera Skynyx 2-1 camera.  I've found that imaging with a high speed video/webcam type camera is a great equalizer for unsteady seeing conditions when trying to capture high resolution images of the sun, moon or planets.  The Deep Sky images were obtained with either a Canon 10D  DSLR camera or a SBIG 237A CCD camera.  I really like both of these cameras, however the Canon 10D is becoming my favorite since I can also use it as a daytime camera for nature photography.  It's nice not to have to take along a lot of extra equipment for daytime photography when heading out for a couple of nights of astroimaging.

All of the solar H-Alpha images were obtained using either one of Mark Wagner's Solar Spectrum 0.2Angstrom H-Alpha filters or a double stacked set of Ken Huggett's  Solarscope  60mm H-Alpha filters.  Mark also designed and built a custom telecentric for my Takahashi Sky 90 to get it up to a f/32 focal ratio at full aperture.  The Solar Spectrum filters are hard to beat for high resolution H-Alpha imaging because of their ease of use and outstanding performance.  The Solarscope 60mm filters are a Fabry-Perot design and are the only front mounted filters currently available with a completely full and unobstructed aperture.  I use these outstanding  filters for full disk and wide field imaging of the sun in either a 0.7Angstrom or 0.5Angstrrom bandwidth configuration.     

Enjoy your visit.

        Pat

    Your comments are always welcome.  mailto:pjstok@earthlink.net

Copyright © 2002-2008 by Pat Stoker