Welcome to Through Light and Time an astrophotography journey to galaxies and nebulae.
Through Light and Time is the astrophotography page of SC Observatory in Thailand.
We operate a range of telescopes in Central Thailand and at Observatorio El Sauce in Chile.
Our telescopes cover focal lengths varying from 1000 to 6000 mm.
Astrophotography is photography of astronomical bodies, celestial events and the night sky. We concentrate on long exposure imaging of galaxies and nebulae.
Many of you will be familiar with how astrophotography is done, some may not be, so here is a brief description of the process.
Our telescopes are installed on tracking mounts. These mounts are calibrated to track accurately to within .2 arc seconds ( there are 3600 arc seconds in one degree). As the earth rotates our telescope stays locked on its target. The telescopes are equipped with very sensitive camera’s that use sensors cooled to around -30 c to avoid dark current noise during exposures. This is necessary since the objects we image are very faint and require long exposures. The camera’s are monochrome camera’s that image through a variety of filters that pass only specific light spectrums. This allows us to process the final result as a color image. Nebulae are often imaged in the narrowband spectrum (Hydrogen Alpha, Oxygen III and Sulfur II) to better showcase detail and are tone mapped to colors during processing.
The average galaxy requires around 25 hours of total exposure time for a well detailed image. Individual exposures generally vary between 10 and 20 minutes depending on the brightness of the target image.
When data acquisition is complete the image is processed with specialized software. This includes calibration which removes camera noise and corrects for light gradients, combination of the various exposures by filter channel, combination of a luminance or detail (monochrome channel) with color channels and various sharpening and contrast adjustments to the final image.
At the end of all of this we have an image of a galaxy or nebula. We are seeing something through light and time. Many of the galaxies we image are as far away as 200 to 400 million light years. That is how long it takes the light from that galaxy to reach us, so what we are seeing happened long ago. Nebulae are generally located within our own galaxy with distances generally ranging between 500 and 20,000 light years. It is likely that some of the nebulae we are imaging look substantially different today or may no longer even exist.
We thank you for visiting our page, we hope you will enjoy our images as much as we enjoyed taking them.
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