Russ's Scope Home

Galleries:
Solar System
Deep Space:
-Galaxies
-Nebulae
-Clusters
-2017 Solar Eclipse
Macro
Me!

Hi, I'm Russ and this is my astrophotography site. I consider myself an intermediate-level amateur astrophotographer. Besides a place to show off my photos, I'd like to share my experiences, both for people to know what this hobby is like, and for people to be able to duplicate (or exceed) my "accomplishments".

My gallery will be a little bit different from others you may see on the web - I'm not just going to include my best pictures, but some of my not-so great ones as well. That way, people can see the progress and the learning curve. I encourage you to read my blog . Among other things, it will help a lot in understanding how much time and effort goes into each of these pictures, and how exactly they are taken.

In the summer of 2006, I upgraded my telescope to the Orion Atlas 11 and an Orion ED-80 piggybacked on top for a guide scope and for wide angle imaging. In 2016 I added an Explore Scientific 127CF. And in 2017 I added a pier through my deck. My cameras are a Meade Deep-Sky Imager III Pro and DMK31AU03 planetary camera. I use Meade's imager applet to take the pictures and Registax, Panavue Image Assembler, and Adobe Photoshop to process them. I use StarryNight for star charts.

I do most of my work from my deck. My equipment is big (about 150lb altogether), so it takes quite a bit of effort to go anywhere else, but I occasionally drive to the Poconos to set up in a random parking lot with darker, clearer skies.

Enjoy my site!

....A note on the background images:

The background images on this site are parts of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), about 1/4 of it on each page. This is my favorite astrophoto because of the profound message it has for us about our place in the universe. It was taken by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a seemingly empty section of the sky, 1/10 the width of the moon, for 11 days. When finished, the image was found to contain roughly ten thousand galaxies. Since it is known that the universe looks about the same in every direction we look, if astronomers were to map the entire sky this way(which would take half a million years), they would find that we can see somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred fifty billion galaxies. If each of those contains about a hundred billion stars, then our sun is just one of more than fifteen thousand billion billion (1 in 15,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) in the known universe.