The Astronomy Thread

We're still trying to define spacemen.

I no longer do it. That was before digital, before a lot of goto mounts. You found your target and use a guide scope adjacent to your main scope with a lighted crosshair you looked through and opened the shutter (OM-1 ollympus camera would stay open manually) and self guided your mount to keep whatever in the crosshairs of the eyepiece of your guide scope. We used slide film. There was no get it lined up and walk off, you sat there and guided it until you were done and closed the shutter.

Something like this. Dark ages now. But in the early 80s that was pretty high tech, up until reall bad digital cameras came on the scene and got better with time, and the mounts that tracked much better and had goto.


This pic was done with slide film. Not mine.

It was either that or a polaroid back in the day. Kids now days have it easy. You also most likely used a reflector telescope. Slow refractors that were ED Enhanced Low Dispertion of light were like the price of a house or more (flourite scopes were in the NASA price range) and even expensive mounts needed to be manually guided. Cats and cass scopes were semi affordable from Celestron but were so long focal length they were uselesd doing anything but lunar or planets and after a C5 was on some of the space missions they weren't cheap either. Things get better over time, now it's all made in China or Taiwan obviously.

Using a non digital camera in film astrophotography was actually the easy part. The part that took the time and such was the mount and the telescope. You focused the telescope after you learned how to make sure you were actually taking a pic over time of something you really couldn't see with the naked eye, then open the shutter and close it when done. I mean that's how digital cameras they use now work. But you get a lot more images to stack together instead of one shot. I used a very plain Olympus OM-1 that was probably made in the 60s or 70s and the only thing to adjust was shutter open or closed. It wasn't for everyone, but neither is digital astrophotograhy. I see lots of post from people that buy a new advanced scope, mount, expensive camera, a laptop/controller for it all. And expect it's going to be like point and shoot. The new smart telescopes work well but even they need some post processing. The amount of people that expect it to come out near instantly like hubble or something. Reason a lot of astronomy forums have banned astrophotography discussions in the new observer parts and such.

15 years ago there was one place in the US that would develop slide film if you sent it to them. I'm not sure there are any now and the last company I remember making slide film was Fuji, so that's likely gone. I watched a video some time ago the guy (engineer I think) from Alabama that makes videos on stuff (Smarter every day maybe) of a company that bought a film developer and the amount of work it took to get right but they had customers lined up wanting to develop film that had been shot decades ago. They were doing "pro" type results though.