Astrophotography

An image of Orion's Belt composited

from digitized black-and-white
photographic plates recorded through
red and blue astronomical filters, with a
computer synthesized green channel.
The plates were taken using the Samuel
Oschin Telescope between 1987 and
1991.

Astrophotography is photography of
astronomical objects, celestial events, and
areas of the night sky. The first photograph of
an astronomical object (the Moon) was taken in
1840, but it was not until the late 19th century
that advances in technology allowed for
detailed stellar photography. Besides being
able to record the details of extended objects
such as the Moon, Sun, and planets,
astrophotography has the ability to image
objects invisible to the human eye such as dim
stars, nebulae, and galaxies. This is done by
long time exposure since both film and digital
cameras can accumulate and sum light
photons over these long periods of time.

Photography revolutionized the field of

professional astronomical research, with
longtime exposures recording hundreds of
thousands of new stars and nebulae that were
invisible to the human eye, leading to
specialized and ever larger optical telescopes
that were essentially big cameras designed to
record light using photographic plates.
Astrophotography had an early role in sky
surveys and star classification but over time it
has given way to more sophisticated
equipment and techniques designed for
specific fields of scientific research, with image
sensors becoming just one of many forms of
sensor.[1]

Today, astrophotography is mostly a

subdiscipline in amateur astronomy, usually
seeking aesthetically pleasing images rather
than scientific data. Amateurs use a wide range
of special equipment and techniques.

Overview

The large 48" Oschin Schmidt Camera at

Palomar Observatory

With a few exceptions, astronomical

photography employs long exposures since
both film and digital imaging devices can
accumulate and light photons over long
periods of time. The amount of light hitting the
film or detector is also increased by increasing
the diameter of the primary optics (the
objective) being used. Urban areas produce
light pollution so equipment and observatories
doing astronomical imaging are often located
in remote locations to allow long exposures
without the film or detectors being swamped
with stray light.

Since the Earth is constantly rotating,

telescopes and equipment are rotated in the
opposite direction to follow the apparent
motion of the stars overhead (called diurnal
motion). This is accomplished by using either
equatorial or computer-controlled altazimuth
telescope mounts to keep celestial objects
centered while the earth rotates. All telescope
mount systems suffer from induced tracking
errors due to imperfect motor drives,
mechanical sag of the telescope and
atmospheric refraction. Tracking errors are
corrected by keeping a selected aiming point,
usually a guide star, centered during the entire
exposure. Sometimes (as in the case of
comets) the object to be imaged is moving, so
the telescope has to be kept constantly
centered on that object. This guiding is done
through a second co-mounted telescope
called a "guide scope" or via some type of
"off-axis guider", a device with a prism or
optical beam splitter that allows the observer
to view the same image in the telescope that is
taking the picture. Guiding was formerly done
manually throughout the exposure with an
observer standing at (or riding inside) the
telescope making corrections to keep a cross
hair on the guide star. Since the advent of
computer-controlled systems this is
accomplished by an automated systems in
professional and even amateur equipment.

Astronomical photography was one of the

earliest types of scientific photography[2] and
almost from its inception it diversified into
subdisciplines that each have a specific goal
including star cartography, astrometry, stellar
classification, photometry, spectroscopy,
polarimetry, and the discovery of astronomical
objects such as asteroids, meteors, comets,
variable stars, novae, and even unknown
planets. These often require specialized
equipment such as telescopes designed for
precise imaging, for wide field of view (such as
Schmidt cameras), or for work at specific
wavelengths of light. Astronomical CCD
cameras may cool the sensor to reduce
thermal noise and to allow the detector to
record images in other spectra such as in
infrared astronomy. Specialized filters are also
used to record images in specific wavelengths.

History

Henry Draper with a refractor

telescope set up for photography
(photo probably taken in the 1860s
or early 1870).[3]

The development of astrophotography as a

scientific tool was pioneered in the mid-19th
century for the most part by experimenters and
amateur astronomers, or so-called "gentleman
scientists" (although, as in other scientific
fields, these were not always men).[1] Because
of the very long exposures needed to capture
relatively faint astronomical objects, many
technological problems had to be overcome.
These included making telescopes rigid
enough so they would not sag out of focus
during the exposure, building clock drives that
could rotate the telescope mount at a constant
rate, and developing ways to accurately keep a
telescope aimed at a fixed point over a long
period of time. Early photographic processes
also had limitations. The daguerreotype
process was far too slow to record anything
but the brightest objects, and the wet plate
collodion process limited exposures to the time
the plate could stay wet.[4]

The first known attempt at astronomical

photography was by Louis Jacques Mandé
Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype
process which bears his name, who attempted
in 1839 to photograph the Moon. Tracking
errors in guiding the telescope during the long
exposure meant the photograph came out as
an indistinct fuzzy spot. John William Draper,
New York University Professor of Chemistry,
physician and scientific experimenter managed
to make the first successful photograph of the
moon a year later on March 23, 1840, taking a
20-minute-long daguerreotype image using a
5-inch (13 cm) reflecting telescope.

The Sun may have been first photographed in

an 1845 daguerreotype by the French
physicists Léon Foucault and Hippolyte Fizeau.
A failed attempt to obtain a photograph of a
Total Eclipse of the Sun was made by the
Italian physicist, Gian Alessandro Majocchi
during an eclipse of the Sun that took place in
his home city of Milan, on July 8, 1842. He later
gave an account of his attempt and the
Daguerreotype photographs he obtained, in
which he wrote:

A few minutes before and after

totality an iodized plate was
exposed in a camera to the light
of the thin crescent, and a
distinct image was obtained; but
another plate exposed to the
light of the corona for two
minutes during totality did not
show the slightest trace of
photographic action. No
photographic alteration was
caused by the light of the corona
condensed by a lens for two
minutes, during totality, on a
sheet of paper prepared with
bromide of silver.[5]

The first solar eclipse photograph

taken on July 28, 1851 by a
daguerrotypist named Berkowski.

The Sun's solar corona was first successfully

imaged during the Solar eclipse of July 28,
1851. Dr. August Ludwig Busch, the Director of
the Königsberg Observatory gave instructions
for a local daguerreotypist named Johann
Julius Friedrich Berkowski to image the eclipse.
Busch himself was not present at Königsberg
(now Kaliningrad, Russia), but preferred to
observe the eclipse from nearby Rixhoft. The
telescope used by Berkowski was attached to
61⁄2-inch (17 cm) Königsberg heliometer and
had an aperture of only 2.4 in (6.1 cm), and a
focal length of 32 in (81 cm). Commencing
immediately after the beginning of totality,
Berkowski exposed a daguerreotype plate for
84 seconds in the focus of the telescope, and
on development an image of the corona was
obtained. He also exposed a second plate for
about 40 to 45 seconds but was spoiled when
the sun broke out from behind the moon.[6]
More detailed photographic studies of the Sun
were made by the British astronomer Warren
De la Rue starting in 1861.[7]

The first photograph of a star was a

daguerreotype of the star Vega by astronomer
William Cranch Bond and daguerreotype
photographer and experimenter John Adams
Whipple, on July 16 and 17, 1850 with Harvard
College Observatory's 15 inch Great
refractor.[8] In 1863 the English chemist
William Allen Miller and English amateur
astronomer Sir William Huggins used the wet
collodion plate process to obtain the first ever
photographic spectrogram of a star, Sirius and
Capella.[9] In 1872 American physician Henry
Draper, the son of John William Draper,
recorded the first spectrogram of a star (Vega)
to show absorption lines.[9]

Henry Draper's 1880 photograph

of the Orion Nebula, the first
ever taken.

One of Andrew Ainslie Common's

1883 photographs of the same
nebula, the first to show that a
long exposure could record stars
and nebulae invisible to the
human eye.

Astronomical photography did not become a

serious research tool until the late 19th
century, with the introduction of dry plate
photography.[10] It was first used by Sir William
Huggins and his wife Margaret Lindsay
Huggins, in 1876, in their work to record the
spectra of astronomical objects. In 1880 Henry
Draper used the new dry plate process with
photographically corrected 11 in (28 cm)
refracting telescope made by Alvan Clark[11] to
make a 51-minute exposure of the Orion
Nebula, the first photograph of a nebula ever
made. A breakthrough in astronomical
photography came in 1883, when amateur
astronomer Andrew Ainslie Common used the
dry plate process to record several images of
the same nebula in exposures up to 60 minutes
with a 36 in (91 cm) reflecting telescope that
he constructed in the backyard of his home in
Ealing, outside London. These images for the
first time showed stars too faint to be seen by
the human eye.[12][13]

The first all-sky photographic astrometry

project, Astrographic Catalogue and Carte du
Ciel, was started in 1887. It was conducted by
20 observatories all using special photographic
telescopes with a uniform design called normal
astrographs, all with an aperture of around
13 in (330 mm) and a focal length of 11 ft
(3.4 m), designed to create images with a
uniform scale on the photographic plate of
approximately 60 arcsecs/mm while covering a
2° × 2° field of view. The attempt was to
accurately map the sky down to the 14th
magnitude but it was never completed.

The beginning of the 20th century saw the

worldwide construction of refracting
telescopes and sophisticated large reflecting
telescopes specifically designed for
photographic imaging. Towards the middle of
the century, giant telescopes such as the
200 in (5.1 m) Hale Telescope and the 48 in
(120 cm) Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar
Observatory were pushing the limits of film
photography.

Some progress was made in the field of

photographic emulsions and in the techniques
of forming gas hypersensitization, cryogenic
cooling, and light amplification, but starting in
the 1970s after the invention of the CCD,
photographic plates were gradually replaced
by electronic imaging in professional and
amateur observatories. CCD's are far more
light sensitive, do not drop off in sensitivity
over long exposures the way film does
("reciprocity failure"), have the ability to record
in a much wider spectral range, and simplify
storage of information. Telescopes now use
many configurations of CCD sensors including
linear arrays and large mosaics of CCD
elements equivalent to 100 million pixels,
designed to cover the focal plane of telescopes
that formerly used 10–14-inch (25–36 cm)
photographic plates.[1]

The late 20th century saw advances in

astronomical imaging take place in the form of
new hardware, with the construction of giant
multi-mirror and segmented mirror telescopes.
It would also see the introduction of space
based telescopes, such as the Hubble Space
Telescope. Operating outside the atmosphere's
turbulence, scattered ambient light and the
vagaries of weather allows the Hubble Space
Telescope, with a mirror diameter of 2.4 metres
(94 in), to record stars down to the 30th
magnitude, some 100 times dimmer than what
the 5-meter Mount Palomar Hale telescope
could record in 1949.

Amateur
astrophotography

See also

Further reading

References

External links

Last edited 16 hours ago by Noaccounta…

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