Who knew you could get nearly Webb telescope-quality images of space from the comfort of your home? Bob Schiff’s been doing it for a year now with amazing results, using a motorized rig that tracks the stars in his Danville back yard.
Schiff is a retired technology executive and engineer who, like many, found himself in need of a pandemic hobby. So he bought a moderately priced telescope.
“I was into ‘Star Trek’ – Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk – back in the ’60s when I was growing up,” he says. “I was intrigued by the possibility of exploring space, and that was the time we had the mission to the Moon with the Apollo program. I always was fascinated by it, but didn’t have the time to pursue it, much like my golf game.”
Schiff’s hobby quickly became an obsession. He bought better telescopes and a camera to attach to them. Today, he’s able to shoot deep-sky objects like galaxies and supernovas, despite Danville being a “Bortle Class 5” location. (The Bortle scale measures night-sky brightness, and a 5 marks suburban territory.) That’s because he uses a cutting-edge rig that allows him to program his optics to target an object, then follow it all night long by star position while snapping images. Schiff can go to sleep, wake up in the morning and have a thumb drive full of material ripe for processing.
The results are clear and vividly colored portraits of impossibly distant objects – the Sombrero Galaxy, the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula – that look like they were produced by NASA, not some dude in his backyard.
“It’s always a new discovery,” says Schiff. “There are some nebulae that are the birthplace of stars, where solar systems much like our own might be forming. At the other end of the life cycle, you’ll see the remains of a star that has exploded in a supernova. So you see the birth and death of stars – to me that’s fascinating.”
For anyone looking to take up astrophotography, Schiff recommends watching instructional YouTube videos, getting a planetarium app like Stellarium and reading websites such as AstroLeague.org and AstroRover.com. Oh, and preparing to have your mind blown.
“The Milky Way is just one of trillions of galaxies out there,” he says. “When you observe them and realize some are much bigger than ours, it makes you realize, we are probably not alone. It gives me high hope and high confidence there are other beings like ourselves out there.”
Check out Bob Schiff’s photography at flickr.com/photos/unlimited_horizon.
Source: www.mercurynews.com