Astronomy

52 ASTRONOMY • DECEMBER 2018

Mark Hanson admits he was never

a stellar student, but his photography is out of this world.

Meet an expert

in remote

astroimaging

M

y fascination with space

started in high school, when

I “borrowed” the Astronomy

magazines from my science

classroom to look at the amaz-

ing pictures. (Sorry, Ms. Z., that you never

saw those magazines again.) I remember

having so many questions about how the

pictures were taken. What type of tele-

scope was used? How deep into space were

those objects? How do you take such spec-

tacular pictures of something so far away?

I wasn’t a horrible student, but I excelled

only at the subjects that interested me —

like space science. Looking back, I guess

this makes a lot of sense, as I still dive into

my passions fully, with little help from

more formal academic settings.

First steps

Fifteen years after high school, in the late

1990s, I toyed with the idea of taking my

own pictures of space, albeit with limited

funds. With what little I knew at the time,

I started taking pictures of aurorae with

a film camera. Then I took pictures of

the Milky Way. Later, I graduated to my

backyard setup: a homemade equatorial

platform with my film camera duct-taped

to the eyepiece of a Dobsonian telescope. It

did the trick at the time. I still remember

seeing the first image of the bands of color

in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Next were the rings

of Saturn. I was hooked.

Around that time, I learned about our

local astronomy club, the Madison

Astronomical Society (MAS). MAS had a

dark-sky site — Yanna Research Station

(YRS) — and permanent telescopes. There I

met the late Richard A. Greiner (“Doc”),

and my life changed. Doc was a retired

engineering professor from the University of

Wisconsin-Madison and already well

known in the astronomy community. He

saw my passion for learning and began to

teach me the mechanics of telescopes,

mounts, cameras, and roof controllers.

There were many nights when I served as

his telescope mechanic out at YRS while he

gave me instructions over the phone.

My passion became an obsession under

Doc’s guidance. As a beginner, there was

so much to learn. In 2003, I took my first

trip to New Mexico Skies in Mayhill, New

Mexico, where I met Mike and Lynn Rice.

I was so excited about having the site’s

6-inch refractor all to myself, and Mike let

1. The author poses near London’s Royal
   Observatory in Greenwich during a
   visit to accept first place in the robotic
   telescope category of the 2014 Astronomy
   Photographer of the Year competition.


2. M27, or the Dumbbell Nebula, is
   shown here imaged with a 14.5-inch
   RCOS telescope on a Paramount ME II
   Mount and an SBIG STX 16803 camera.
   The author also recently added data
   from a 24-inch PlaneWave telescope. This
   Hα/OIII/S2/LRGB image has exposures
   of 6, 10, 6, 4, 2.7, 2.7, and 2.7 hours,
   respectively. Unless noted, all data
   were calibrated, aligned, and combined
   in CCDStack, with all other processing
   done using CC Photoshop and PixInsight.


3. Mark frequently uses the 24-inch
   telescope at Stellar Winds Observatory in
   New Mexico to take his stunning images.

ALL I

MAGES:

MARK HANSON, UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

1

2

3