For 2 years now, I've been postponing the decision to buy a telescope. My reluctance was based on two things; the nearly 1500 USD cost that I would be spending on it and the really sketchy weather that we have in Sri Lanka which makes it very difficult to get clear skies. The more I read and researched about how the amazing photos like the following are taken, the more I realised that my casual approach of just grabbing the telescope and going somewhere to do astrophotography isn't going to work. It's going to need some proper preparation.
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| Photos like these require hours of shooting and at least a good one hour of prep work. |
It is then that I started looking at alternatives. If you don't have your own telescope and a photography rig, one other way to try it out is to rent it. And there are at least three sites out there in the world that does it; the MicroObsevatory by Harvard Uni, iTelescope and Slooh.
MicroObservatory is free and allows you to select from a catalogue of objects. Once you select the object, the exposure and the field of view, the site will send you an email once the capture is done. One of the major drawbacks I saw in their site was the inability to specify the number of images that you want to capture.
Generally in astrophotography, you dont take just one shot of the target. Instead a number of photos are taken and then stacked to get the final output. In MicroObservatory, if you want to do this, you need to fill the same form over and over. The site does allow you to use separate Red, Green and Blue filters which allows you to capture and combine the three channels separately.
I thought of taking my first jab at remote astrophotgraphy with MicroObservatory because it was free. But the results are disappointing.
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| M51 - Whirlpool Galaxy |
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| M101 - Pinwheel Galaxy |
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| NGC 253 - Sculptor Galaxy |
Except for the M51, the other two are processed along with Dark Frames. All three consist of total exposures from 10 - 20 mins. However as you can see these are nothing close to what the other amateurs do. So what is going wrong here? Why isn't it working?
Well the answer may be that Harvard, NASA and NSF did not set up this particular project as a high-fidelity imaging platform, but as a method to popularise astronomy among students and the masses. If you do take a step back and think about it, being able to capture a faraway galaxy on photo is pretty cool. And it is really great that Harvard removed at least few barriers to entry in the astronomy field, the cost of equipment (and also the weather ;) ).
While MicroObservatory might not be the best choice for producing very serious strophotography images, it is still a very cool free resource that you can use as a stepping stone. And if you don't have your own camera and telescope, then this is definitely something you should try.
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