Preface to the Second Edition

An edition with further refinement, insights and to expand the hobbyist’s horizons.

The last four years have been a whirlwind of activity. From a complete newbie to a credible amateur has been both challenging and huge fun. The first edition was constrained by time and economics. I’m glad to say the feedback has been extremely encouraging; the pitch of the book was just right for the aspiring amateur and intermediate astrophotographer and in particular, readers liked the cogent write-ups on PixInsight, the fact it was up to date with the latest trends and, oh, by the way, please can we have some more? Some topics and imaging challenges were left untold in the first edition and since new developments continue to flourish in astrophotography, there is now sufficient content to fill an effectively “new” book.

When I authored my original photographic book, Way Beyond Monochrome, it was already 350 pages long. The second edition, with considerable new content, pushed that to over 530 pages. That took 6 years to write, which was acceptable for the mature subject of classical monochrome photography. The same cannot be said of astrophotography and I thought it was essential to reduce the project time to a few years, in order to preserve its relevance.

I only write about things I have direct experience of; so time and money do limit that to some extent. Fortunately I have owned several systems, in addition to many astronomy applications for Mac OSX, Windows and Apple iOS. As time goes by, one slowly acquires or upgrades most of your equipment. There comes a point, after several years, that the cumulative outlay becomes daunting to a newcomer. As a result I have introduced some simpler, lower-cost and mobile elements into the hardware and software systems.

In the first edition, I deliberately dedicated the early chapters to the fundamentals. These included a brief astronomy primer, software and hardware essentials and some thought-provoking content on the practical limitations set by the environment, equipment and camera performance. I have not edited these out as these are still relevant. In the second edition, however, the new content concentrates on new developments; remote control, imaging techniques and an expanded section on PixInsight image processing.

Many readers of the first edition particularly liked the practical chapters and found the processing flow diagrams very useful. You should not be disappointed; in the second edition, after the new PixInsight tutorials, there are several case studies covering new techniques, again featuring PixInsight as the principal processing application. These illustrate the unique challenges posed by a particular image, with practical details on image acquisition, processing and from using a range of equipment.

Astrophotography still has plenty of opportunity for small home-made gizmos and there are additional practical projects too in this edition to stretch the user, including software and hardware development. After some further insights into diagnostics, there is an extensive index, glossary, bibliography and supporting resources. The website adds to the book’s usefulness and progression to better things:

www.digitalastrophotography.co.uk

Clear skies.
[email protected]

“Supermoon” Lunar eclipse, September 2015 (This is not a book on solar system astrophotography and any resemblance is purely coincidental.)