digital astrophotography
NEW: See the progress of the new Remote Observatory in Southern France!
Welcome to my Homepage Sky-Image.com
You will find many astronomical images, astronomical articles, but also non-astronomical images and texts on this homepage. My goal is to share the beauty of our universe with everyone. Why am I doing astrophotography? In normal photography you are imaging objects you see through your viewfinder. Thats quite simple. Looking at the object and pressing the knob. In less than a second you will find your final image on the card in your camera and you look at it at once. Its a bit different for astrophotography: The most fascinating point here is that you are not seeing the object with your eyes! It gets only visible if you have a large optical mirror or lens (or both) in front of your camera, which collects many photons. The second difference is, that you are not exposing less than a second - you probably are opening the shutter for many hours! Why? Your eye is „updating“ the image you see very often. But you can control the opening of your shutter in the camera: The longer the shutter is open, the more photons of an objects can crash in the sensitive electronic eye. Thats the magic behind astrophotography.
Most images are taken with my recent setup, a Takahashi FSQ106N refractor on a Takahashi EM200 Temma 2 mount. The light is collected by a SBIG STL11000M cooled camera.
This setup is in a permanent observatory in Germany. As I am living in Zuerich/Switzerland, the observatory is completely remote controlled from my home in Zuerich.
Besides all these astronomical images, you can find images from the beautiful swiss mountains, starpartys, and many more.
I hope you enjoy this page, for feedback you can send me an email:
Thank you very much :-)
Daniel Marquardt
Zuerich, Dezember 2007
