The following image is of the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation Sagittarius. Ever since I got into Astrophotography, I’ve wanted to image this nebula because it is so big and colorful. Emission nebulae are some of the most beautiful and colorful objects in the night sky. I photographed this deep-sky target using my 80mm refractor…
On June 5th, 2012, I witnessed the Planet Venus transit the Sun from my backyard. I used an Orion 4.5″ Skyquest Dobsonian telescope with a homemade solar filter to observe the event. My parents joined me to watch with their solar glasses on. I remember the feeling of watching the Sun up close through the…
The Pillars of CreationThanks to some advice from the guys over at Astrogab, I have purchased a very powerful Action Set for Adobe Photoshop. I highly recommend this to any astrophotographer because it can save you serious time when processing an image. In light of these new tools, I have been going through and re-processing a…
M20 – The Trifid NebulaIt all started on Friday, April 27th when I was lucky enough to spend another night at the RASC Niagara Observatory in Wellandport, Ontario. The clouds hung around until about 1:30 am, just as the moon was setting. Now that the summer constellations are beginning to appear again, I wanted to…
This post provides a great example of what to expect when shooting the Eagle Nebula with a stock DSLR camera. When people ask me whether it’s necessary to modify their DSLR to capture deep sky astrophotography images, I often think back to my early experiences with M16. M16 – The Eagle Nebula I have since…
This post was originally published in March 2012, when I was still learning how to use my astrophotography equipment. I was starting to see some promising results using the Explore Scientific ED80 refractor and my Celestron CG-5 GoTo mount. More importantly, the lessons I learned from Jerry Lodriguss were beginning to sink in and my…
Over the past weekend, I again traveled to my dark sky observing site for some DSLR astrophotography. The nights of late January here in Ontario, Canada are long and cold. My deep sky target selection is a collection of 3 galaxies in the constellation Leo. The Leo Triplet of Galaxies This Saturday January 21st was…
As you may have been able to tell from the image below, this post is quite old! This was the first time I attempted to capture Messier 45 through a refractor telescope from the backyard. Since then, I photographed The Pleiades several times. Looking back at this post, I realize how pivotal the books I…
This is an old post from my early adventures in deep sky astrophotography before I had a backyard to call my own. From 2011 through 2014, I spent a lot of time at my local astronomy clubs observatory. It took me about 45 minutes to drive there each way, and I set up all of…
This is an old post from November 2011. At the time, deep sky astrophotography was still very new to me. Since then, I have photographed the Orion Nebula and Running Man Nebula several times, and it’s still one of my all-time favorite deep-sky targets. Interestingly enough, this post talks about my first time using an…
Photograph the Moon with a point-and-shoot camera You can take some incredible pictures of the moon through a telescope using an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera. Some of my very first astrophotography images were of the moon in its many phases using the afocal method (eyepiece projection does not use a camera lens) method. The photo above…