Astrophotography: The art of catching the light!!

The glorious pictures of the Milky Way or the rings of Saturn are no longer limited to professional astronomers at large observatories using fancy equipment. Many amateur astronomers find astrophotography a beautiful way to enhance their astronomical viewing sessions. If you know a little bit about the night sky and have seen some objects through a telescope, it is not too difficult to capture them in your camera! The widespread availability of digital SLR cameras and specialized image processing techniques actually allow amazing pictures to be taken, even from a light polluted city like Mumbai! In fact, usually the camera gives one much better views of the night sky than what is achievable just by looking through a telescope! So whether it is just star trails or a planet, or the beautiful dust lanes in the arms of our Milky Way, all you need to capture some awesome photographs, is rather rudimentary hardware, a basic knowledge of the night sky, some planning, and of course, a lot of patience and persistence!!

About the Speaker:
Vinita Navalkar has been working on the ASTROSAT project at TIFR, on the ground-based calibration of the Soft X-ray Telescope and fabrication of multilayer optics for the future Hard X-ray Telescope. Before that, she did her MSc in Physics (Electronics Instrumentation) from Ruia College, Mumbai. Vinita is an amateur astronomer and an active member of Khagol Mandal, conducting night-sky observation programmes for various groups. She has a passion for deep sky observation, and one of India’s top notch Messier marathon participants with a best score of 105/110.  She began her journey of astrophotography 9 years ago, with an image of Jupiter taken with a point and shoot camera. Since then, she has spent hours under the stars perfecting her skills in one of the most frustrating forms of photography! She has captured very good photos of various nebulae, clusters, galaxies, planets, comets, etc, but her most favourite object is the Milky Way.