Home | Interests | Ron Zincone's Gallery | Favorites | My Telescope | Miscellaneous
Welcome to Ronald Zincone Photography! My once hobby and now business deals with a specialized form of photography called astrophotography. It is a combination of photography, astronomy and nature. It is low-light photography at the extreme. Imaging the night sky takes a great amount of patience, hands on trial and error, determination, sacrifice, taking good notes and burning lots of film. The results are worth it all. I started out in October of 1998 experimenting with black and white film and then moved on to color prints. But it was not until I decided to try slide photography that my results became more pleasing. Slide photography is "What you see is what you get". The advantage is that you avoid the extra steps of first creating a negative and then a print as you have in film printing. As you make copies of an original, there tends to be a decrease in image quality. In slide photography, your negative is your print and this is mounted. The downside is that you have less flexibility to change your images so you must be very accurate on your imaging technique. In astrophotography, which is the most difficult form of photography because of low-light situations, be prepared to burn lots of film, take good notes and bracket your exposures to obtain those few good images and occassionally that 'trophy' shot!.
You can see some of my best images displayed on my Photo Gallery page.
My astrophotography is accomplished with a fully manual 35mm Olympus OM-1 camera using a tripod as well as a 10inch Newtonian Dob astronomical telescope for piggyback, prime focus and eyepiece projection photography.
Some of my imagery was created using my Meade 4.5" Newtonian Reflector telescope and my Celestron G8 SCT in a process called prime-focus photography and eyepiece projection photography. See further information below.
Several of my deep sky images were also accomplished using a hand made barn-door tracker. This device allowed me to guide my pictures by hand following the rotation of the earth.
I hope to display celestial images using each of the above methods on my photo page.
The most basic and simplest form of astrophotography is camera on tripod. The main requirement is a fully manual 35mm camera that has a "T" or "B" setting on its shutter dial so that long exposures can be taken. A fully manual camera is also vital since all operations operate mechanically and not by battery which can be depleted (especially during long exposures and cold temperatures). Also of importance is the use of a cable release attached to the camera's shutter button so that camera vibrations are minimized. Camera on tripod (unguided) astrophotography is nice for those short exposure images like constellations, planetary conjunctions, sunsets, auroras, etc. Depending on what lens you use and the subject you want to capture, these shots should not exceed 30 seconds otherwise star trails will appear. (star trails are lines on your image created by the circumpolar rotation of the earth and its effect on the subject you are shooting). To see an example of this, go out on a totally clear evening and set up your camera on tripod with a 24mm, 28mm or 50mm lens and point directly at Polaris. The wide-angle lens are better since they will capture a larger section of the sky as well as some nice foreground. Attach a cable release, load camera with slow- to medium-speed film (I recommend EliteChrome 200) and depress the shutter using the cable release. Time this exposure for about 30 minutes and then close the shutter. Try several more exposures using various exposure times like 60 minutes, 90 minutes, even 3 hours. Set your fstop between 2.8 and f5. Bracket your fstops. You will find that the longer exposure times will show trailing on the images which are longer in length. If you are able to center Polaris in the center of the viewfinder, you will notice circular trails known as circumpolar trails. You will see that Polaris (the North Star) is the only star (centered) that doesn't show trailing. This makes for a great demonstration of the earth's rotation and a nice framed shot to boot.
The next step up in astrophotography is the piggyback method. This is accomplished using either a barn-door tracker which is guided by hand or attaching your camera to a telescope using a piggyback bracket that allows the telescope's motorized drive unit to follow the earth's rotation. This is called guided astrophotography. Both procedures require that the unit is accurately polar-aligned. This form of astrophotography is great for wide-field images of the milky way and deep space as well as comet photography. Since much longer exposure times are being utilized, these kinds of images are more productive in detail but the longer exposure times also allow for inaccuracies to occur. I recommend slow film for better resolution since the grain is tighter. (EliteChrome 200 is a great workhorse low-light film and can easily be pushed to 800 while keeping exposures shorter).
The last step and most difficult form of astrophotography is through the telescope. The first method is known as prime focus photography. This is accomplished by attaching your camera adapter to your 35mm camera using a T-ring and then to your telescope focuser. This turns your telescope into a huge telephoto lens. If your telescope is 910mm in focal length, you now have a 910mm telephoto lens! This method is useful for nice lunar shots. The second and more complex method is known as eyepiece projection and this is done by inserting an eyepiece into your camera adapter and one end to your camera using the T-ring and the other end into your telescope's focuser. This turns your telescope into an extremely high magnification scope which is very useful for high-resolution planetary and lunar photography. In through the telescope photography, both guided and unguided methods can be utilized. Both lunar and planetary photography require mainly short exposures often less than a second for the moon and several seconds for the planets. This is because the moon is big, close and bright whereas the planets are distant objects very small and faint. Both slow film and medium fast film like EliteChrome 400 is recommended but faster films can also be used for shortening exposure times but the draw back is grainier images. If you are going to enlarge your images, I would recommend the slower films so that less grain is introduced.
Back to my Homepage