Bernie's Astronomy Home Page

Howdy ! I'm Bernie Beckel. I live in Denver, Colorado. Like a lot of other people I have wanted a good telescope since I was a kid. Well 30 years later I did it. I have been into photography since high school (Yes I was a high school Photog geek) and the astrophotography just seemed like the best of both worlds. When you look at a lot of objects in a telescope your eye can only gather so much light BUT film to some extent will keep gathering light as long as the shutter remains open so the camera brings out amazing detail that your eye can't see.

The main telescope is a Celestron C-8 plus. An 8 inch f/10 telescope (about 2000mm) on a fork mount, a wedge base (to set it to my latatude of 40 degrees) and a very heavy duty tripod.
The smaller scope on top of it is a Celestron 3 inch f/5 scope (about 400mm) that I use when I want to photograph objects that are too wide to fit into the field of view of the larger telescope.

Here is a link to some of my other telescopes.

Other Telescopes

Here are some links to some of my astro photos. More to follow later

Bernie's Astro Photos

Bernie's Lunar Photos

Bernie's Wide Field Astro Photos

Hubble Photos

If you would like to E-MAIL me here is a link
Bernie's E-MAIL address

FREE ASTRONOMY SOFTWARE !
Software to help you locate just about anything in the night sky. Try it, its great.
Home Planet Astronomy Freeware

Many objects of interest require exposers of 10 min to over an hour so the telescope mount must follow the movement of the earth BUT no mount has motors and gears accurate enough to follow the stars for more than a few min. So what is done is called guiding. You look through a special cross hair eyepiece while you are taking the photo and use up, down, right and left buttons that plug into the telescope to make very small changes in the way that the telescope mount tracks the earths movement. This means looking at the same star through an eyepiece the hole time the camera shutter is open, after about a half an hour it gets very hard to do.
The picture below the telescope is just some of the accessories required to take good astrophotos. The accessories can cost as much as the telescope.
I have 2 cameras to use for astrophotography.
The first is an Olympus OM-1. This is an old but very well build camera but it does 2 very important things that you need for astrophotography. 1) it does not need its battery to keep the shutter open. All most all newer camers will close the shutter after just a few min. when the battery goes dead. 2) It has a mirror flip up. At a focal length of 2000mm the smallist vibration can blurr the shot so fliping up the mirror used for the viewer befor you open the shutter stops this vibration. Even the slightist touch to the telescope or the tripod will also blurr or leave star trails on the photograph. The second camers is a Nikon F. It does not need a battery, has mirror flip up and it also has a Nikon 55mm, f/1.2 lens. This is a very fast, very sharp lens that is great for wide shots under very dark skys. This is called piggy back photography. The camera with a regular lens rides piggy back on the telescope so it can track the earths movement while the shutter is open.

Here is a link to a beginers guide to Astro Photography
Astro-Imaging Hints Page

Here is a link to another beginers guide to Astro Photography basics
Astrophotography Basics by Galaxy Photo

Here is a fairly simple camera mount that you can build to help you track the stars
Scotch Mount -- Double Arm

GET YOUR COPY OF DEEPSKY 98 NOW.

http://www.deepsky2000.com

Well I hope I havn't put you to sleep by now.

More Photos to follow so stay tuned for more.