Please choose from the following categories:

Nebulae  Star Clusters  Solar System Constellations
 

Check out astrophotographer Jeff Haynes' CCD Gallery!

My Image Gallery from Garden of the Gods, Seven Falls, and Cave of the Winds, all located in and around Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Click here to view some less-than-perfect pictures and pick up some tips!

Some words about astrophotography: Here we will attempt to shed a little light on the mysterious art of astrophotography, explain how our photos were taken, and also give some tips to fledgling astrophotographers.  Astrophography is a potentially frustrating, but very rewarding hobby.  To acheive the kind of results you see here requires patience, the right equipment, and alot of money to waste on film and developing. 

All you need to take pictures of the stars is a manual SLR (Single Lens Reflex, with a Bulb setting for indefinite exposures) 35mm camera, a tripod, and a cable release.  This setup is very versatile.  With a 35-50mm lens you can take wide field shots of the constellations (about the maximum time you can expose before the stars start to trail is 30 seconds).  The summer Milky Way is an excellent target for that kind of exposure.  You can experiment with different films, but generally faster film is better.  We often use Kodak Royal Gold 1000.  Also with this setup you can capture comets, the moon and planets when they are grouped together.  With a zoom lens you can get a nice close-up of the moon also.

The other option here is to go for star trails (ex. Orion above).  Generally, any exposure beyond 30 seconds will give you trails.  How long you want them is up to you.  Generally speaking, the darker your sky is, the longer you can go.  This is also one of the best ways to capture meteors on film.  Use your imagination, and be creative.  Frame your shot around a landmark, natural or man-made.  Some of the most dramatic astrophotos are taken this way (a really good way to get your photo published in an astronomy magazine, incidentally!)

The next step up is to attach your camera "piggyback" to a clock driven telescope, so that you can get long exposures with pinpoint stars.  The telescope tracks the sky, and hence your camera does also.  Again, faster film is better.  There's a tricky thing about taking long exposure photos called "reciprocity failure", which basically boils down to how long you can expose before the film is "saturated", and further exposure is useless.  When this happens, the pictures come out too green sometimes.  Generally speaking, 15-20 minutes is about the longest you can expose with a 35mm lens.  Once again, experimentation is the best way to learn. 

Finally, there is "prime focus" photograhpy: attaching your camera directly to a telescope.  This is the most difficult and time-consuming type of astrophotography.  It took many months (and dollars) to figure out how to do this right.  Having someone to learn from is a great help.  We won't go into a lot of detail about the technique here; if you'd like to learn more, Sky and Telescope's Astrophotography section is a good place to start.

It may take awhile, but once you start to get good results, then all your hard work has paid off.  Granted, it's safe to say that in any given batch of pictures, roughly 80% of them won't turn out the way you want.  But that makes the ones that do all the more special!  So in closing, be patient, be persistent, and most of all have fun!
 

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