ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY
The practice of Astrophography has changed dramatically over the past few decades. The tedious world of pushing film to its limit to gather those faint photons has been transformed by digital methods of detecting that subtle energy.
Whether you are interested in landscape photography with the Milky Way as your background, or elusive galaxy collisions, those images are within the reach of the amateurs with affordable equipment today.
The techniques to capture astro-images are the focus of one of TAAA’s special interest groups, our Astro Imaging Special Interest Group (AISig).
AISIG
Members of TAAA’s Astro Imaging Special Interest Group (AISIG) pursue all types of astronomical imaging–deep sky, planetary, lunar, solar, comets and more–at all levels of experience. We teach each other and learn from each other. We welcome all imagers, including those who are just thinking about this challenging and rewarding way to explore the night sky. We meet monthly on Zoom, from 7:00 pm to 8:00 or 8:30, and we post Zoom details and our meeting agendas on the TAAA Forum at groups.io. Topics range from elementary to advanced, and every meeting dedicates time to issues facing new and budding astroimagers. We also meet in person a few times a year for special workshops, most recently an all-day program on image processing techniques. AISig Members actively use the TAAA Forum. If you are interested in astroimaging we encourage you to follow and participate in the imaging discussions on the Forum.
Our programs may consist of a presentation by a guest speaker or AISIG members, members sharing their images, their equipment setups, or perhaps a new acquisition to be shared with the group. Come and share your problems whether they are image acquisition, processing issues, or hardware/software related. Take advantage of the group knowledge for suggestions to solve these problems. Time permitting we offer a tutorial presented by one of the better known astro photographers and in some cases by one of the group members. Software that can be discussed is PixInsight, , Photoshop, MaximDL, Nebulosity, TheSky, CCDCommander, CCDAutopilot, and others. We have deep sky imagers photographing from 200 mm to more than 2000 mm focal length, planetary imagers using webcams, and cameras from DSLRs to astro cameras from ZWO, QHY SBIG, Starlight Xpress, and others.
Contacts:
Tom Rolfsmeyer mrolf(at)earthlink.net or
Gregg Ruppel ruppel0709(at)gmail.com