Sunquest - Imaging the Night Sky

This is my quest: to follow that star ...

Last update: 7/3/08

The stars: distant suns. This site reflects the culmination of my personal quest to become an astroimager - an amateur astronomer whose avocation is to capture images of the celestial wonders that pass over our heads, largely unnoticed, every day. Thus, this is the triumph of my quest to photograph the distant suns of our Universe - a sun quest.

This journey began with the construction of an observatory in the New Mexico desert, far away from the lights of major towns and huge cities. This resulted in the Bunker Ranch Observatory. There you'll find pictures, descriptions, and accounts of the process of building the observatory, and information on the equipment used to take the images herein.

Your monitor should be adjusted in contrast and brightness so that all 21 grayscale levels below are discernable. You may have to lower the room lights to succeed at this. (Hint: use the "brightness" control to change the levels of black, and the "contrast" control to change the levels of white.)

Night Gallery (Picture, if you will, a dark sky ...)

We begin with the first astrophoto taken with the BRO's major instrument, a 400mm Hypergraph. This is M13, the famous globular cluster in Hercules, in a 30-minute exposure with a Pentax 67 camera loaded with Ilford 3200 film. Note the "X" across the center of the cluster.

Below is the first color image taken with the observatory's STL-11000XM CCD camera. This is an LRGB composite of 5-minute images of the Flame and Horsehead Nebulas in Orion. The camera was attached to a Borg 125ED operating at f/4 for a focal length of 500mm.

This is an image of Comet Holmes - a small comet out by the orbit of Jupiter that came to fame with a sudden outburst of gasses that increased its brightness by more than a million times, and made it an easy naked-eye sight in late 2007. This is a short exposure designed to capture details of the comet's nucleus, within the faintly visible halo that was still easily visible as it grew larger than the Sun.

This image was taken with a Borg 125ED configured at 500mm f/4, with an SBIG STL-11000M CCD camera.

Again taken with the Borg 125ED and the STL CCD camera, below is a short (one-minute) exposure of the North America Nebula (NGC7000), demonstrating that a CCD camera can capture images with far shorter exposure times than film (with some help from a bit of digital image processing).

This is another one-minute image from the Borg 125ED and STL CCD camera - the Pleiades (M45).

And now for some more color - this is the Borg 125ED and STL CCD camera again; but here we combine four 20-minute images (one each in white, red, green, and blue light), to get a shot of the Rosette Nebula (the nebula is designated NGC 2237; the open cluster of stars inside the nebula is NGC 2244). Note that this image is only 1/4 the size of the original in width and height; that means the original image has 16 times more data than seen here! (Well, actually, it's worse than that, because the original is 16 bits per pixel while this is only 8 bits per pixel. So the original really has 4,096 times the data of this image - 4 times the resolution both horizontally and vertically, and 256 times the color information.)