Home»Astrophotography and Astrolandscapes

This gallery is a collection of photographs taken of a variety of celestial objects. The most accessible object for photography is the Moon and I keep the best photos of the different stages of the moon, taken with a variety of different optical instruments. The planetary, deep sky, and astrolandscapes are relatively new endeavors and are really experiments as I learn more about capturing distant and dim objects with different methods.

I was able to capture three lunar eclipses, but all under less than ideal circumstances. The first eclipse disappeared below the horizon before the eclipse completed. For the second eclipse, the moon was shrouded in clouds for a large portion of the run up to the eclipse and resulted in soft images despite the use of stacking techniques. In the third instance, the presence of pesky clouds bedeviled me most of the eclipse, although some good photos were obtained during totality (blood orange moon).

In August, 2017, I was able to capture the total solar eclipse from Riverton, WY. A great experience and some of the photos are presented here. The remainder of the photos are presented in a gallery dedicated just to photos taken during the Great American Total Solar Eclipse.

On 11 November 2019, I caught much of the transit of Mercury across the sun. It was a cloudy day and the path shown by the time lapse photography has some gaps in it as a result of some periods having thick clouds.

In October 2020, I was fortunate to have a few clear nights when Mars was near it's closest point of approach and at opposition. It was relatively large and both high in the sky and quite bright. I captured my best images of Mars during this period.

Beginning in late 2018 I began to get decent photos of distant galaxies and other deep sky objects. That skill began to improve in 2019 and in 2020 I started doing narrowband imaging of deep sky objects using a filter wheel in conjunction with a cooled monochrome camera.

In December 2021, I captured two images of the elusive Comet Leonard - one pre-dawn and the second just after sunset. This was my second experience with a comet, the first being a very brief encounter with Comet Neowise in 2020.

I will update this gallery from time to time, but for now, this gallery is best described as a work in progress on a new frontier.