Welcome to my website and thank you for stopping by! All pictures you find here are taken
from a light polluted area close to the city of St.Gall, Switzerland. The observatory is located at 727 m
above mean sea level and is owned by the stronomical society
'Antares'. Because the telescopes are not
fixed permanently but moved out of the building on a clear night, the equipment has to be set up and
calibrated for each photographical session. This is a relative time consuming process.
My daily bussiness is studding geophysics at the swiss federal institute of technology.
The scientific background and mathematical applications help me to better understand astronomical dimensions
and timescales as well as the physics behind observed processes.
I got into astronomy as I was about 15 years old. Once on a clear night that time, my father
and me were wondering whether one of those bright light spots is a star or a planet. Shortly afterwards the
first introductory book was bought and we both began to read about the mystery of celestial objects. From the
first moment since I was inspired by those 'pretty' pictures in that book. However, because we are not able
to see the colors of these objects even with large apertured telescopes I aimed to start with astrophotography.
It took another two years until we bought a
celestron C8
on a vixen GP mount. The system was obviously not suitable for carrying a heavy camera while exposing for couple of
minutes. Therefore I started with visual astronomy which in fact was the better way to begin with. Another year
passed and by chance we heard about the astronomical society
owing an observatory close to where we lived. On year later I finally was able to start astrophotography with
a SBIG ST-8 camera and an
AstroPhysics AP130 refractor. The small chip of that camera
and the very time consuming process of generating colored pictures was the reason I started with a Canon digital
single-lens reflex (dslr) camera in 2004. The Canon EOS 300D was the first dslr-camera I took for astrophotography.
Later I moved to a modified EOS 20D and finally I purchased a
Hutech modified EOS 40D. In the beginning of 2009 our astronomical
society decided to by a new CCD-camera which was another big step forward. After some time of investigation the well
known STL-11000 CCD-camera
was chosen to be the new high end member of our electrical equipment. Despite the relatively large pixels
(9mu) in combination with short focal lenght telescopes this camera is one of the best in its category. The reason
why I again changed from the DSLR-camera to the CCD-camera is 'light pollution'. With DSLR cameras the amount of
details one can obtain for very faint parts in an object under these circumstances is much more affected than if
using a sensitive CCD-camera. So I hope that this fine peace of equipement will help me to expand the amount of
details in future images.
New results will be updated frequently. I hope you enjoy!
Fabian Neyer,
July 2009