NEAIC: Tony Hallas

Tony Hallas had the opening talk discussing deep-sky processing talk with a lot of useful information about his workflow. There were a number of useful tips on using Photoshop, and once again there was a large emphasis on signal-to-noise ratios. The fun part of the talk was the introduction which covered the history of astrophotography reaching back, amazing to me, into the late 19th century. The scope used was built by a A.A. Common in 1879(!) but named the Crossley reflector after the person he eventually sold it to. The scope, apart from being mounted equatorially, looked a lot like a modern truss-tube Dobsonian. Lick Observatory has a wonderful page on this history at http://www.ucolick.org/public/telescopes/crossley.html. The scope spent 10 years unused in England due to poor weather and was eventually donated to Lick Observatory. After a lengthy period of tuning, the tracking worked for exposures of up to 4 hours with untrailed stars. The pictures are fantastic and the detection of "spiral nebulae" was first noted though their nature was still unknown.