Information

Astrophotography is complex and time-intensive. Creating a single image can take anywhere from weeks to months to complete. However, I’m only going to bore you with some technical details. There are a lot of websites out there that will satisfy your curiosity if you need more information.

I primarily photograph nebulae. These large objects are hydrogen and oxygen gas clouds emitting light at specific wavelengths. Astronomical objects are faint, very faint. A single two-minute exposure will usually reveal very little. You have to take hundreds of single exposures and stack them together, one on top of the other, to yield something that looks reasonable. In this sense, Astrophotography is the closest you will get to the darkroom experience in the digital world. You only get to see what you have photographed once you have stacked (developed) all your images. Before this moment, everything is just pure guesswork. However, this is not the end of the story. Only in post-processing can you truly sculpt the light from the image’s darkness to produce something pleasing to the eye.