November 2012

Time to upgrade the old 115/900 Newton telescope from the childhood. The Skywatcher 80ED mounted on a solid Skywatcher EQ5 should work! No computer, but a simple interval timer and a lot of patience for the polar alignment and the manual focus. At that time, we needed one hour to prepare everything, one hour to arrive on site, two more hours to align, tune, adjust, finally asking ourselves... which object we can capture!

At that time, we learnt how to plan a session, how to optimize our equipment, how to make calibration pictures, and how not to forget the telescope counterweight.

March 2013

Living at the 4th floor in Graz, Austria, it was probably not the best place to photograph deep sky object. However, we found it was a perfect place to test the equipment from the balcony. 

It was time to make several pictures of the same object and "stack" them, as the real astronomers say. Using the freeware DeepSkyStacker, we learnt how to add pictures and exceed 10 minutes of single exposure. This picture of the Leo Triplet was made of three pictures of ten minutes each, achieving the impressive integration time of... 30 minutes!

Let see now how it works with a clear sky

November 2015

Still, we couldn't achieve the quality of nice pictures we see in the internet. It seems that DeepSkyStacker and Photoshop were not sufficient anymore, and we had to explore new horizons.  

March 2017

We are now clearly limited by the relatively small aperture of our 80mm refractor. It is now time to upgrade the setup into a 200mm reflector and new mount, a Skywatcher AZ-EA6, still with an autoguider. 

We can now reasonably think about photographing galaxies and smaller objects like planetary nebulae, but still, something is missing. Something that should help us to make the pictures we always dreamed about. But a few months later...

December 2017

Those of you who are familiar with narrow-band astrophotography may think: "What an ugly picture!" And so we did too, but this was our very first narrow-band picture, using the same filters as most of the great images you can see from the Hubble Space Telescope. 

We didn't even think it was possible to realize such a picture from the backyard, with an awful Bortle scale of 6 which means that most of the time, we can't even see the Milky Way.

This first picture encouraged us to continue.

October 2019

The picture of the elefant trunk nebula is probably our first "Wow picture", where we realized the real potential of long exposures over several nights. At that time, we still needed to bring the entire telescope out, reperform the polar alignment and re-test every telescope function.

But wait, if we can do proper narrow-band astrophotography from the the backyard with acceptable results, why not...

- Franck, do you think about the same?

- I'm afraid I do. 

January 2020

Finally, we did it!

One pandemic and few months of hard work later, it is finally ready! Our first remote and fully automatized observatory. No need to freeze outside anymore, and plenty of time to drink good beers, wines and whiskies in a warm place, looking at what will become our best friends: Ekos and Kstars.