Astrophotography from 1992

I just came across these photos that I took back in '92 when I used to spend time enjoying amateur astronomy.

The first photo in the series shows what it's like if you just point your camera into the sky in a suburb and hold the shutter open for about 20 minutes or so. Even then you can see an incredible variance in color, and it's worth doing if you want to try it some time. Point at the north star for a nice effect.

The starfields were taken with an Olympus OM-1 (I use a really old camera that doesn't have a battery so that I can get 30+ minute exposures by manually locking the shutter open). The dense starfields were taken with the camera looking sideways into our galaxy, so they are rich with stars and detail. To counteract the rotation of the earth for the starfield photos (which were between 20 and 40 minutes exposure), I mounted the camera on the back of my telescope, which has a clock drive to compensate. No clock drive is perfect, so I stood there for each photo with a crosshair reticle eyepiece sighting on a bright star, stopping the drive or speeding it up as necessary to keep the setup lined up for the entire exposure. It's tiring, but the results were worth it.

The moon shot was me holding the camera sans lens over the eyepiece hole (sans eyepiece as well, if I recall) and just snapping a shot using the the telescope as the camera lens. I'm sure there's mounts that make this easier and more reliable, but it seemed to work reasonably well. The sun shot shows some solar flares and was taken using a borrowed filter.