I AM KELLY
HI THERE!
I have always had an interest in all types of photography, science, technology, engineering and mathemetics. I am one that loves all things technical. I can vividly remember my first very simple telescope that was given to me as a gift by my parents when I was less than 7 years old. It would be another 30 years before I would rekindle my passion for astronomy, sparked by a long and strange period we all went through where there was little interaction with people, and the outdoors was an escape from pandemic lockdown and indoor burnout. It started with an 80mm aperture Celestron telescope less than 200 dollars - looking at the moon, and the amazingly vivid rings of Saturn for brief moments until the Earth's rotation would spin them out of the field of view. Then it made natural sense to attach my ~10 year old DSLR (Canon T4i) with a 30 dollar adapter and take a shot. And with that I was hooked (I'll skip over the long journey of learning, failing, troubleshooting, and exceptional support from the niche-but-larger-than-I'd expect astrophotography community). One of the reasons I created this website and small business is to share the amazement I have at what you can still see from even light polluted urban backyards, but I do make occasional trips to darker skies in California and Arizona.
The astrophotogrphy on this site uses techniques of taking multiple medium exposures (typically 1-3 minutes) that are then stacked, along with calibration files (noise calibration frames using dark calibration images, bias or dark-Flats, and finally flat field calibration images to remove image artifacts such as vignetting and dust). These images are stacked in astrophotography dedicated software and post-processed generally in Photoshop - other than image artifact touchup, never "faking" photons or painting in the image...the photons depicted in the images are what fell on the imager. The images and stacking process integrate photons falling on the focal plane for many hours - this is because the objects are so far away and so faint relative to the background that the long exposures allow additional aquisition of "signal" in the heavenly body relative to the background. In particular in the Southen California region, I use either narrowband multi-spectral filters, or broadband lightpollution filters for the Deep Sky Objects (DSOs) such as nebula and galaxies. Most images take several nights of imaging which, given our foggy, humid, turbid skies in coastal SoCal, can mean a week or 2 months to get the total integration time needed, if the DSO doesn't recede out of the visible field of veiw in the urban night sky before then. Then at least a week or more of part time post-processing. For my equipment, I generally use a dedicated single-shot color astrocam for everything but the Milky Way, and autoguiding with either Williams Optics Z73 APO refractor or Celestron 8SE with off-axis guiding.
A little about me. I am a Mechanical Engineer by education and have worked in a technical feild my entire career. I have an infinite curiosity for most things, especially but not exclusively science and engineering, and I love learning. I enjoy sharing and inspiring love and interest in STEM for children and adults alike. The world we live in is full of wonder and amazement, if you just take the time (and effort) to look.