Rick Schrantz
Rick Schrantz is president of the Bluegrass Amateur Astronomy Club in Lexington, KY. He has been astro-imaging for 20 years, and is now an avid imager of h-alpha objects and also likes planetary imaging using a webcam.
About his program:
Many of the most spectacular objects in the sky are emission nebulae. Often, they are large and dim. Modern, small-pixel CCD cameras with high h-alpha sensitivity combined with high quality camera lenses can produce images 3, 10, even 20 degrees wide! Add in a narrow band h-alpha filter, and even light pollution is effectively eliminated. As a bonus, the short focal lengths used (28 to 300 mm) do not require the high precision guiding of telescope images.
- Extreme Imaging-
Do you want to image beyond NGC, beyond IC, beyond Sharpless, into the rarefied realm of objects that reside in no catalogue? Do you want to image things discovered only in the last 25 years, or even just last year? Do you want to image objects that no other amateur has ever imaged? I will show you how to find these incredibly faint objects in obscure catalogs, publications, and on-line databases.....and use the power of CCD cameras, fast camera lenses, and filters to record them.
Some images:
This one goes with the wide-angle imaging talk. It is supernova remnant Simeis 147. The field of view is about 3 degrees wide.
The second image goes with the Extreme Imaging talk. It is planetary nebula Pierce-Frew-Parker 1 (PFP-1), and it was discovered only last year!
We look forward to it