Astronomy - February 2014

52 ASTRONOMY t FEBRUARY 2014

Where other astrophotographers

fear to tread

DARK BEAUTY

s a child growing up in rural Utah,
I was blessed with a relatively
unspoiled view of a dark night sky.
I looked up often, fascinated by
space itself and by our newfound
ability to explore it. As obsessive as I was
about high-profile missions like Apollo,
however, I was more interested in what
was going on at home. The large, earth-
bound telescopes of the day were produc-
ing images that sparked my imagination. I
spent hours at the local library poring over
Palomar, Mount Wilson, and Lick observa-
tories’ images of deep-space objects. Their
observations of galaxies, stars clusters,
and gaseous nebulae captivated me, and at
first the secondhand beauty satisfied me.
Soon, though, I wanted to see these objects
through an eyepiece myself rather than
just in the pages of
books.

Knowing this, my parents bought me a

telescope when I turned 12: a Sears 60mm

refractor. What I saw through this instru-

ment was nowhere near as stunning as what

I had seen in print. Eventually, I turned the

telescope toward the most photogenic gas

giant planet — Saturn — and upon seeing

its rings through this simple setup, I

became dedicated once again to viewing

the heavens. I continued to explore the

night sky with my modest apparatus, but I

also still marveled over the images from

people using much larger telescopes.

Idaho imager

After I grew older and went to college out of

state, I put my telescope down for a while.

In 1996, though, a move to southeast Ida-

ho’s dark skies and transparent atmosphere

inspired me to pick it up again. What I saw

through the telescope lens, however, was

again not as vivid or detailed as the visions

that had inspired me as a young child.

I realized that the only way to see the

universe as it had appeared to me then was

to enhance my sight — technologically

speaking. Since I could not leave the shut-

ters of my eyes open until they collected a

lot of light, I decided to get a camera and

take images myself. First, I bought a

Celestron 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain tele-

scope and an Olympus OM-1 film camera.

Unfortunately, I discovered that its focal

length did not work with my camera, so I

decided to try piggyback imaging, where

the camera lens did the optic work and the

telescope served as its base.

As my first targets, I chose the objects

that had initially caught my childhood inter-

est in astronomy. With black and white and

color film, I recorded my first images of

the Milky Way, the North America Nebula

(NGC 7000), and the Orion Nebula (M42).

A

Tomas V. Davis is committed to shedding light on the dusty,

dark parts of the universe through his portraits of nebulae.

text and images by Thomas V. Davis

Thomas V. Davis images faint objects under the

dark skies of Inkom, Idaho.

Author Thomas V. Davis long ago focused his imaging on dusty nebulae. Now, with a two-camera setup,
he is in the middle of a journey to image all 159 van den Bergh objects deeply and in detail.

The Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) is mostly ionized hy-

drogen gas. It is home to the smaller, constituent

Keyhole and Homonculus nebulae and the star Eta

(η) Carinae, one of the most massive and luminous

suns known. NGC 3372 hosts a large number of hot

young stars that excite its gas, causing it to glow.

(6-inch Astro-Physics 155 EDF refractor at f/5.4,

13.5 hours of Hα/SII/OIII/RGB exposure through an

FLI ProLine 16803 CCD camera)