Constellations

Film photography is, in one sense, the easiest of the possible ways to get pictures of the night sky. In fact, with nothing more than a camera and a tripod, you can start taking pictures and pick out the brighter stars with exposures of as much as 20–30 seconds, depending on what part of the sky you are pointed at. If you don’t mind star trails, you can expose for much longer. And, if are at least a little mechanically inclined, you can build a barn-door tracker which will let you take exposures of up to 10 minutes (or even an hour with a more sophisticated design. A barn-door tracker is not what we used here. I have only a modest set of mechanical skills and we live in an apartment which is large only by New York City standards. With two small children running about, power-tools and construction messes, even transient ones, are not a good idea. So I bought a CG5/EQ4 mount with drives and and a small “table top” to fit on the dovetail bracket where I can mount a camera. This is the expensive way to get started and the mount is overkill for the load I put on it, but I hope to eventually put something like the Celestron C5 Schmidt-Cassegrain on the mount. My set of portraits will slowly grow, and I hope to eventually have a collection as nice as what are on Jeff DeTray’s web site, but for now this is what I have.

Aquila	Capricornus	Cassiopeia
Cepheus	Cygnus	Delphinus
Hercules	Lyra	Orion
Perseus	Sagittarius	Scutum
Ursa Major