Fuelling Life with Cosmic Wonders by Captain Omiros Angelidis (QSE Director)

It all started during my early cadet nights somewhere in the Northern Atlantic. The sea was unusually still, mirroring the sky’s twinkling tapestry. As I leaned against the ship’s railing on the bridge’s wing, I focused my vision on a small group of stars that seemed to shine brighter and closer, as if inviting me to explore their secrets. The moonless night made their presence even more dominant. I went into the bridge, grabbed the star chart (we still had those onboard), and by checking the estimated altitude and azimuth, I found out that small group of stars was the well-known Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, or Subaru. Back then, it was just a small group, not something remarkable. Who knew what beauty lay in that small patch of sky?

That was the turning point and a near-divorce experience. Yes, did I mention that the hobby is an endless cash pit which, if you do not manage to tame, can be detrimental to your marriage ? Luckily, I am married to a wonderful and supportive woman who shares my passion for exploring the night sky.

And here we are, 22 years and over eight scopes later, blessed with relatively good skies, few cloudy nights, and minimal interference from the jet stream. I try to balance my life between work, being a father, and an avid astrophotographer.

However, the hobby is not for the faint of heart. It requires dedication, determination, patience, a lot of effort, and a lot of study.

It all starts with getting a solid equatorial mount, capable of tracking the Earth’s rotation so the object you are photographing stays solidly in the field of view of the lens or telescope. Then you need the horsepower of AP (astrophotography). The lens is the gateway to the universe. These come in many shapes and sizes, with prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to the cost of a nice seaside apartment. I have a scope that suits each purpose. A refractor for deep space astrophotography, a Dall-Kirkham type of Japanese-built absolute killer for solar system observations, and my latest addition, a Newtonian telescope, an ultimate combination of both.

The next main accessory needed for astrophotography is the camera—your eye that captures the images for creating your next masterpiece. As technology progresses, cameras range from super simple to cooled sensors reaching temperatures lower than -20°C, which decreases the noise of the captured frames.

But that’s not the end. I bet you have browsed the internet and seen some remarkable bright pictures of celestial bodies and thought, “Wow, that looks great!” But the truth is far from it. It is not as simple as point and shoot. A dim patch of light traveling for the past 21 million light-years until it hit the camera sensor. Can you realize the vastness? The distance from Earth is measured in light-years. A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year, which is about 9.46 trillion kilometers. Therefore, 21 million light-years is roughly 198.66 quintillion kilometers away from our small speck of dust, our planet.

In order to create a remarkable astrophoto, you need to get hundreds of exposures (images). Then you use specialized software to stack the exposures to create a master light frame. That master light frame, composed of hundreds of stacked images, is then processed by adjusting the light balance, colors, and different wavelengths of light to reveal the object in a vividly live format.

The example above is the Pinwheel Galaxy, which was a set of 230 pictures of 3 minutes each. Therefore, the total time where the camera was collecting light was 11 hours and 30 minutes!

Don’t want to fill you with technical terms and gibberish. You just need to understand that a single astrophoto requires a great deal of time under the night sky spanning more than 2-3 good nights, 5-6 hours to stack the exposures with software, and a couple more hours to process it into its final format. The total amount of time to create the above image was 21 hours and 30 minutes of acquisition, stacking, and processing time. The good thing with modern technology is that you don’t need to be next to the telescope to get the images; it can be done from the comfort of your living room.

I currently have my scope permanently mounted in a roll-off roof shed. So it takes me 10 minutes to set up and be ready for captures! I love these advancements!

Astrophotography has taught me that the universe is vast and mysterious, much like the ocean I once sailed. And while my days of navigating the seas are behind me, the stars offer an endless voyage of discovery, one that I will continue to explore for the rest of my life.

Concluding this brief insight into my hobby, I’d like to share a profound quote from the Greek philosopher Socrates:

“Man must rise above the Earth—to the top of the atmosphere and beyond—for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.”