Cosmos Safari

Astrophotography as a Gateway to Science Communication with Ron Brecher

• David Farina & Rob Webb • Season 1 • Episode 7

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Embark on a cosmic odyssey with Ron Breacher, a virtuoso of the night sky, whose transformation from an amateur stargazer to an astrophotography maestro is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Clutching the telescope that started it all, Ron shares the celestial moments that propelled him from admiring the stars to immortalizing them through his lens. He opens up about the pivotal role played by Terrence Dickinson's "Night Watch" in his journey and the exhilarating leap he took with his DSLR to capture the heavens. The addition of a personal observatory didn't just enhance Ron's stellar pursuits—it skyrocketed them.

Our voyage doesn't stop there; we also navigate the starlit nexus where astrophotography meets science communication. Ron and I challenge you with trivia that spans the historical tapestry of astrophotography, from its first moonlit photo to the earliest spectral studies of stars. Alongside the thrill of discovery, we traverse my evolution into an astrophotography educator, imparting the nuances of software like PixInsight and the transformative effect of virtual teaching spurred by global upheavals. Sharing the cosmos has never been more engaging or essential.

As we set our telescopes towards the future, we ponder the advancements on the horizon for astrophotography—where equipment refinement meets the dawn of artificial intelligence in image processing. Reflecting on my own gear odyssey, I emphasize the vital importance of finding the tools that resonate with your passion. We explore how innovations like automated in-camera stacking and AI enhancements are reshaping our quest to photograph the universe. Ron and I, your fellow star chasers, affirm the profound joy found in the hands-on pursuit of astrophotography, balancing technical mastery with the simple pleasure of gazing into the vastness above. Join us, and be inspired to etch your own starry legacy.

Here is a link to the YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/BpmaFghFILk?si=Pvz5304lImvz7rUM

Here is a link to the blog post: https://www.cosmossafari.com/post/astrophotography-as-a-gateway-to-science-communication-with-ron-brecher

You can find Ron at https://astrodoc.ca/ 

Masters of PixInsight Workshops: www.mastersofpixinsight.com

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Rob Webb:

I'm Dave and I'm Rob, the last minute astronomer.

Dave Farina:

And we're here with Ron Breacher and I just had an opportunity to see Ron's Masters workshop the other night. How are you doing, Ron?

Ron Brecher:

I'm doing great Awesome. Really nice to be here.

Dave Farina:

Excellent. So, ron, can you just kind of give us some background? How did you get started with astrophotography? I mean, this is such an amazing hobby. I've been doing it for a number of years and I know that a lot of our guests are probably interested in learning more. Our listeners are from various backgrounds, but many, I believe, are at some point interested in looking at astrophotography at least, or maybe even doing it themselves. So how did you get involved?

Ron Brecher:

Well, you know, I started out as a visual astronomer and I'm still a really passionate visual astronomer. You might have seen a post yesterday or today of my wife and I. We had a bunch of people out in the driveway last night with a couple of like a 10 inch and a 20 inch one looking at the moon and planets and a few deep sky objects. So visual first for me and astrophotography came later. So visual astronomy everybody who does it has a creation story. Mine has like four legs on the stool.

Ron Brecher:

I started really in 1997 when we moved into the house that I live in now. My wife was pregnant with my daughter in my second child and my son was about three and a half years old. So we moved to the country and the skies are kind of dark, which was cool to start with. My old bank said you have all these visa points. Before we close down your mortgage and your visa, do you want to use your points to take something from our catalog? And I got what I thought was a toy telescope for my son. It turned out it was a four and a half inch reflector and it was good enough that I saw the moon and Jupiter and Saturn, which completely blew me away. Meanwhile my daughter was born and my daughter was colicky, so she screamed a lot at night and the way I soothed her was to put her over my, over my forearm and walk her up and down the driveway until she settled down. And so I'm walking up and down the driveway with this darker sky and getting hooked on the stars. I have this really cheap telescope that got me hooked, but it's really unsanalsmining, hard to find anything, it's rickety and so on.

Ron Brecher:

Anyway, christmas comes along and my business partner gives me Terrence Dickinson's book Night Watch. A lot of astronomers get started with that book Night Watch, and I did. I read it from cover to cover and I was particularly interested in chapter four, which was choosing and using the telescope. And they had a sidebar article with a picture of my telescope entitled Junk Scopes from Asia. So so I realized that it wasn't me that was the weak link here and I took my bonus money that year and bought a real telescope in ultimate 2000 and never looked back. I mean, I've had many telescopes since then, but that's how I got started visually. And then I got into Sky and Telescope and Astronomy Magazine and so on. Oh wait, I just got a circle. Back to Night Watch for a second. The fifth edition of Night Watch was just released a week or two ago. My photo's on the cover I saw that.

Dave Farina:

That is so awesome. Congratulations on that.

Ron Brecher:

I can't tell you Terrence Dickinson picked that photo and you know, he's responsible for so many of us getting into this hobby. But to your first question how did I get into astrophotography? So now I've done visual. I'm doing visual for a while and I tried not to use. I didn't use the computer much. Basically I would use a flashlight and a start chart and I kept a. I'm just going to step up for a second. I want to grab a dish or a leaf.

Dave Farina:

I have a three volume handwritten log.

Ron Brecher:

Here's my volume one of my logbook, and I kept this log for years until I started astrophotography and I did some sketches Nothing really fancy. I've got a. My very first photos are in here, so this is July 2002. I took a picture of some sunspots by holding up a camera to a camera, but one day, 2002. You were doing film at first. That was film, yeah, so that was film.

Dave Farina:

We'll have to circle back to that a little later.

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, I did film. It was hard with film but regardless where I that was just denigling, when I really got hooked was around 2006 or so. I got an issue of sky and telescope. By this time I really knew my way around this plan and had favorite objects and so on, and one of them is globular cluster M13. Love it visually.

Dave Farina:

Yeah, it's beautiful, Definitely the my favorite globular cluster also.

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, but there was a in the back of sky and telescope. There's a reader gallery, reader photos. There was a picture of M13. And I read the credit and it was shot with the same DSLR that I owned and a scope similar to one that I owned. And I went to my wife and I said I've got to try this, I have to do this.

Rob Webb:

There you go, got you hooked.

Ron Brecher:

Oh my goodness, there's no right. I was absolutely hooked, so that would have been around 2006. For my 50th birthday in 2009, gail bought me an observatory on the other side of my driveway. We had Wayne Parker from Sky Shed installed Nice and he and I sat on a couch and drank beer in my driveway while the installers erected that shed and then, when they went away, we got the pier installed and I was imaging the same night.

Dave Farina:

Wow, and that yeah.

Ron Brecher:

And you know I've had all kinds of equipment changes since then, but that's how I got started.

Dave Farina:

That's a great story and the observatory.

Ron Brecher:

That's a game changer in terms of productivity. It's you don't spend time setting up and tearing down and flat you know. Flat frames last until a speck of dust from somewhere. You know, they've lasted a long time.

Rob Webb:

Speaking of the first astrophotography you were doing and seeing what other people could do, I have a little three question trivia for the three of you. Okay, let's see what you get Now. Let's see, dave, you have to answer first okay. And Ron's gonna answer after that, okay.

Dave Farina:

All right.

Rob Webb:

First question is when was the first photograph of an astronomical object taken, and what was it of?

Dave Farina:

I don't know.

Rob Webb:

You're first Dave and it's not multiple choice, so you just kind of have to go.

Dave Farina:

This is hard and I do not know the answer, so I'm gonna give you a ballpark that it was the late 1800s.

Rob Webb:

Okay, and I would think it would be the moon. What do you think?

Ron Brecher:

they took a picture of first the moon and I'm gonna ask a question is it, does it have to be a photograph, or can it be a daguerreotype?

Rob Webb:

It can be a daguerreotype.

Ron Brecher:

Oh yeah, so I think it was a daguerreotype of the moon and I think it was 1883.

Rob Webb:

Oh, even earlier than that, it was 1840. Wow, 1840.

Ron Brecher:

And that was a daguerreotype on it, but I just couldn't remember the year.

Rob Webb:

Yeah, it was. It kind of has this weird and I'll show it up here for you guys but for people who are listening like it's this black and white looking photo and you can tell that there's a picture of the moon, but it kind of looks like you know that, like 30s animation or whatever, where the moon had like something in its eye Smashing Pumpkins did a video about it and it's got all these little like bubbles and kinds of things. But it's definitely the moon and you're right, that is a daguerreotype right there. Well done.

Dave Farina:

What is a daguerreotype? Because I honestly don't have a clue what that is.

Rob Webb:

I'm gonna leave that to Ron.

Ron Brecher:

I didn't explain the technology, but it was a precursor to photography with silver plates.

Dave Farina:

Okay, interesting.

Rob Webb:

Yeah, they were talking about like wet methods or something here. Okay, so next one. Okay, Ron, you're winning right now. The. When was the first spectra of a star recorded?

Dave Farina:

Am I still answering first? Yes, the first spectra of a star. I'm gonna go with the night. Well, okay. So back this up. I know that in the Hubble era, when actual Edwin Hubble was doing things, that there was some spectroscopy being done already, believe. So I'm gonna say 1910.

Ron Brecher:

Okay, Ron, I'm gonna say a little bit later 1920s.

Rob Webb:

Sorry to tell you but you're both like 40 years off. It was 1863. Wow, the English chemist William Allen Miller and English astronomer Sir William Huggins used the wet colloidian plate process to get the first ever photographic spectrogram of a star. And they actually did two stars. They did Sirius, makes sense, it's the brightest one and they also did Capella. So Wow, cool. But, okay, no points for either of you on that one All right let's all right last one, and then we'll get into.

Rob Webb:

Yeah, we'll get into. So now, lastly, what is this hobby that we're talking about actually called? Is it A astral photography, b starving artistry, c old man yells at cloud, or D your second mortgage?

Dave Farina:

Could there be another one for all of the above?

Rob Webb:

Secret answer E E all the above you got it, you got it, I got it. Really, yep, that was it.

Dave Farina:

That was it.

Rob Webb:

You win, although, Ron, would you like to also pick E yeah.

Ron Brecher:

I'll pick E.

Rob Webb:

OK, there you go. Well, now our guest has won. So well done.

Dave Farina:

Good work, good work Is there some good trivia there, rob See a little bit difficult to get the exact dates, but I'm pretty happy with my results.

Rob Webb:

Yeah, not bad, not bad 40 years off, oh well, Now, I knew none of this as of yesterday. So so, speaking of science communication and what we do here, I guess you started talking about what got you into astrophotography and you kind of got that itch from seeing that photo in there and then you have to scratch that itch. But so once you got into astrophotography, how did you start getting into actually teaching it to other people and why are you doing that?

Ron Brecher:

Well, I've always been a teacher and I'm a communicator by nature. I always have been so in the daytime world. I have a PhD in biomedical chemistry and I've been a consultant for 35 years in toxicology, and part of that work a lot of that work in fact involves communication. So half of my practice is about helping scientists communicate complicated ideas more effectively. So I love to teach, I love to write.

Ron Brecher:

What had to happen for me to be able to do that about astrophotography is I had to get good enough that people want to get that stuff from me, and I struggled with Photoshop and some other somewhere for quite a while and then I got a friend of mine challenged me to try Pixinsite, and so I took Photoshop off my machine. I tried Pixinsite, struggled with that for a while, but then I found this website. It was a. You purchase these sets of tutorials called IP4APcom image processing for astrophotography, and there were three sets of about 24 minute tutorials and I like I ate them for breakfast and I really learned Pixinsite to the point that I wrote to the owners of the website and said here's some before and after I learned your stuff. The owners of the website, of course, were Warren Keller and Pete Pru, who are now my partners Because I like to teach and write. Warren asked me to be the technical reviewer for his book Insighted Pixinsite and I did that both editions.

Ron Brecher:

But that is how our relationship got started. And then we decided to start teaching live workshops, and we started doing that in 2017. When the pandemic hit, that had to stop. Obviously, we had to cancel two workshops that were booked. So they were booked for the spring of 2020. Three days before the Buffalo workshop is when they basically closed the border and we couldn't continue.

Ron Brecher:

But you can't keep a good man down. And it didn't take long before I don't remember who which one of us had the idea to see if we could do some virtual workshops. That turned into Masters of Pixinsite, and IP for AP now is part of Masters of Pixinsite. So Masters of Pixinsite has two real components. One is a series of workshops and we run those online about once or twice a month and you just pay to attend that workshop. If you attend a workshop you can attend it Any time. We repeat the same workshop you attend for free.

Ron Brecher:

The other part of Masters of Pixinsite is what used to be IP for AP and that's a monthly or annual subscription and there are hundreds of videos anywhere from two minutes to 15 minutes long that provide you know up to date, quick tips. You know how to get around certain window settings, a problem that you might be experiencing, a quick way to fix it, a new way to do something, introduce a new tool or a new script. And if you I should say if you want to check that out if you go to mastersofpixinsightcom, there is a one week free trial for IP for AP image processing for astrophotography. So you can try that for a week and explore. There's my own little section in IP for AP is called Astrodocs Corner, so go and check that out. There's everything from soup to nuts in there in terms of ways to get more proficient at fixinsight and also for anybody who comes to any workshop or subscribes to an IP for AP.

Ron Brecher:

You get to come to our free quarterly workshops. They're called quick tips. We do one about every three months. We have one coming up, actually on the 26th I think you heard about it. Warren's going to be showing you about it. It's in used telescope live data. So you know, like I said, you can't keep a good man down. We're really passionate about doing this. Masters of Pixinsight is about making our customers the ministers, and you know like I have, warren and I both have a bunch of private students. I have, I think, five that have won NASA APODs.

Dave Farina:

That's got to be rewarding to you, yeah.

Ron Brecher:

Oh, it's fantastic. And you know, not just APODs, but image of the day on an astrophotopie which you know may be more prestigious, I think, than an APOD because there's more people involved in judging it Right. You know More organic.

Dave Farina:

Yep.

Ron Brecher:

And that is also why I write for Sky and Telescope and amateur astronomy and BBC Sky at night. I love to write, so I started writing for Sky and Tel, just wrote one piece for them and that turned into a couple of pieces a year and now four or five pieces a year. And now I'm on the masthead as a contributing editor which, like imagine all those years ago. I'm looking at a Sky and Telescope, thinking, oh man, I have to try this. And now I'm. My own articles are in there. It's crazy.

Dave Farina:

That's so cool, very cool.

Ron Brecher:

It's nutty.

Dave Farina:

So so where is the coolest place that you've ever done astronomy?

Ron Brecher:

Oh boy, probably the coolest place would be at a construction site in the west coast of Costa Rica.

Dave Farina:

A construction site, a construction site so a construction site, so we had not what I was expecting at all.

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, we were looking to get some. We were looking to get some property going and do like an astronomers bed and breakfast up in the mountains on the west coast of Costa Rica. Didn't pan out long story but while that was all kind of in the planning stages, we were going down there at times a year and where we lived the skies were not that bright, or were not that dark because there was local lighting everywhere. But if you walked five minutes up the road, turned right and went down into the valley there was a construction site, a big clearing, and that was probably the coolest, spookiest, most frightening place I ever was because there was all kinds of weird jungle noises and animals that you don't recognize, but I was in a group.

Ron Brecher:

We were doing visual astronomy and the highlight for me was seeing the sculptor galaxy like in your face NGC 253, in your face. And the other highlight same time was with binoculars. I had 10 by 42 image stabilized binoculars, so about a four degree field looking at Andromeda and it overflowing the field.

Rob Webb:

Oh really. Oh, that's great.

Ron Brecher:

It was crazy. So, yeah, that was the coolest place I ever observed. I'm not really that excited, I go to store parties.

Rob Webb:

I like visual observing when I'm.

Ron Brecher:

I don't do imaging, usually when I travel.

Dave Farina:

Okay, it's two. What portal class are you in at your house?

Ron Brecher:

About a five and a half five six.

Dave Farina:

Oh, okay.

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, not. You know it's not great, but it's not bad. You can work with it.

Dave Farina:

Right, yeah, the right filters, especially yeah.

Ron Brecher:

The right filters are the right strategies.

Rob Webb:

Okay.

Ron Brecher:

You know, the most light polluted part of my sky is the east. Anything that's in the east is going to be in the west in a few hours.

Dave Farina:

Sure.

Ron Brecher:

Right, Um, I have an auto mall to myself about two and a half miles away and that ruins my southern sky up to about 40 degrees. So I just don't shoot below 40 degrees. You know, you make it work.

Dave Farina:

Yep.

Ron Brecher:

And you know I have access to all kinds of remote data, but I I never feel like that's mine. Uh, I rarely process other people's data for teaching. I'd rather struggle with the data that I can get from home.

Rob Webb:

Oh, that's interesting because I sort of look at a lot of the astrophotography stuff. I look at it as people trying to do, trying to get like the best data, the most data, process it as much as you possibly can, in a sense. Now this is coming. We talked a little bit before the interview that, like, I'm a very, very, very newbie to this sort of astrophotography and I usually just take my camera out, my DSLR, and try to get those one shots, but it feels like it feels like you would actually want to get that data from a bigger telescope that you still have access to and process that data. But you're telling me you really you would rather have your hands in every part of it.

Ron Brecher:

I wouldn't say I'm after the best data, but after the most fun. Okay, so my wife says this life is short and then you die. Right, and I. What fun is it just getting data from someone else? Well, when it's cloudy or if you don't have a telescope, that's definitely an option. And you know when, when I'm unable to handle getting my own data myself, I'm going to use those remote sources. Of course I am. How can you argue with Hubble and web data? Everybody can get that, you know. Yeah, but if I really after the most fun, I got to be gathering the lightness Right.

Ron Brecher:

I got to be struggling with all the problems. The drivers and windows up unscheduled windows I've written articles about this. Undischeduled windows updates, family commitments, clouds work. How much time do you actually get Exactly?

Rob Webb:

Exactly. I think that's actually one of the reasons why I like using my DSLR, because I can set up or actually even my phone. Now I can set it up and get it out there, take a bunch of different shots, as long as I'm not trying to take a 30-minute shot. I can just keep taking them and taking them and experimenting, and then I have one in front of me. My question to you now is I've got that, I know how to operate a DSLR camera for the most part. What would be the next steps? Because I'm looking at what I'm doing here is nice and easy. Then I see PICS Insight as that super-duper camera, Swiss Army knife type of thing. How do I go from DSLR camera photography to a PICS Insight level type of thing?

Ron Brecher:

Well, so let's break that down into a few parts. First of all, you've only talked about the camera. You haven't talked about the updates. I don't know.

Rob Webb:

About the what time.

Ron Brecher:

DSLR. You talk about the camera, the DSLR, versus, say, a Fult Astronomical camera. Okay, but what about the optics? If you're planning on using a DSLR lens, stick with the DSLR. So the next step. So now move to a different part of your question. If you wanted to move from DSLR to something else, what would it be? If it's for deep sky astrophotography, it would be a cool one-shot color CMOS camera. It's going to feel very, very much like your DSLR in use. The differences is the temperature of the chip will be stable, okay, which permits you to easily calibrate your images. And we were talking about the whole notion of science and being scientists. The best data is calibrated data. The pictures that come in raw contain photons that you don't want in them from the dark corner of the camera, from the bias signal that got added and from the optical properties of your system that might give you vignetting the presence of things like dust particles on the sensor or the filter.

Ron Brecher:

So, having that stable temperature allows you to calibrate your frames and get rid of all that unwanted junk that's impacting the quality of your picture Now what if I didn't have the money to buy one of the one-shot color CMOS cameras?

Rob Webb:

Like, what is something that I could do with still just my DSLR? Like, can I use DSLR pictures or images in Pixinsight and all that?

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, pixinsight will process any type of image file. So my CMOS cooled CMOS camera has the same sensor in it as a Nikon D850 camera. There's no difference in the sensor. The difference is in the back of the sensor. I have a cooler, you don't. That's the difference.

Rob Webb:

OK. So then because? So what you're saying is that because the sensor stays cooled, there's fewer artifacts in the pictures. So then when I want to process them because I don't process anything right now if I do want to process them, that's going to make them easier to work with, is that?

Ron Brecher:

what you're saying. It'll improve your signal to noise ratio. Ok, yes, but not only will the raw image be cleaner to start with, but because of the stable temperature of the sensor, it's very easy to make calibration frames, bias, dark and flat frames. That will further clean up that image. So, whether you stack or you don't stack, you'll end up with a cleaner image. You don't have to stack OK, ok and pick. So then the other aspect of this is astrophotography isn't one great big ball of stuff that you have to know all at the same time. Right, I know people who will never learn how to collimate or operate a telescope, because they use a remote telescope and have the data gathered. They want to process the data and make pictures. There's other people. I have a friend in Australia who makes telescopes, likes to gather the data but doesn't want to process it. He gives it to me to process.

Rob Webb:

Yeah, that might be where I'm kind of at.

Ron Brecher:

I'm trying to say there's a couple of completely independent skill sets required for astrophotography. Right Acquisition is one thing. Processing is another. So you can learn how to process data from any source, ok, and get good at that, while you're still learning how to acquire your own good data.

Rob Webb:

Yeah, I think this it's such an interesting idea to go into this. It's one of those things that I've been wanting to do. I have a couple sets where I took like 10 pictures of the same thing with my telescope on a mountain and I tried and it didn't work. It sounds like I wish I could have just like a one-on-one. Here are 10 of my pictures of the Pleiades Show me how to stack them, show me how to do the bias and the other things and sort of do that step by step. I think that's kind of the type of thing that, as a real brand newbie, like that's the kind of thing I'm looking for, because it can look like a huge hurdle.

Ron Brecher:

There's that article that was it's part of the download package from the workshop that you attended the other night. It's in Sky and Telescope from 2017. And it's called Demystifying Image Calibration and it actually tells you how to acquire the calibration frames.

Ron Brecher:

Ok, Now if you're using a DSLR, you have a few challenges because you don't have the temperature regulation Right. So if I'm imaging at minus, with my sensor at minus 10, I shoot minus 10 darks. But you can't really do that. So what you kind of have to do is shoot some darks at the beginning of your session, pause in the middle and shoot some more, and then at the end shoot some more, okay, and throw those all in a pot and on average, your frames will be okay, okay.

Rob Webb:

So let me ask you this what would be the one skill Like for me who's just done DSLR single shot stuff, what would be the one skill that would give me the biggest bang for my buck in the images that I'm making? Like, what's the one skill that you think would really make them pop better, Even if it's just doing the dark frames or just learning how to stack or whatever? What do you think would be the biggest bang for my buck in one skill?

Ron Brecher:

I think, learning how to stop, because if you can shoot one frame, you can shoot 16. And if you can combine those 16, you're going to get an improvement in the image and the signal to noise ratio. No model what else you do with it. An image composed of 16 subs is going to be better than one composed of a single five minute sub. So if you're already able to get a good quality single sub, get good at combining 16 or 20 subs.

Rob Webb:

Okay, all right, that gives me a good direction, because I'm just looking and, like whoever was Emerson or somebody, two paths diverged in the wood. I'm looking at 16 different paths right in front of me.

Ron Brecher:

Even if you don't want to calibrate your frames. You just want to align them together and stack them. You can do that in weighted batch reprocessing. You don't need calibration frames. So if you can shoot a single frame, you can shoot 20. Just load those 20 into the script. It'll scream at you and tell you that there's no calibration frames and you did something wrong. Just click through it and it'll run.

Dave Farina:

You know it's interesting. I've kind of gone through the journey for the past seven or eight years and I've gotten all the way to the point where I was using monochrome filter wheels, the whole thing. Sometimes it's just nice to step back and shoot some pictures with the DSLR mirrorless camera. There's nothing wrong with kind of working backwards if you're hitting a plateau or if you're feeling like you're hitting a wall. It's kind of where I've what I've done recently.

Dave Farina:

I have some kids now and I have less time and my skill set is rusty and I just took a few steps back and I said you know what I really need to start fresh and have some successes, because I was having a lot of gremlins in my process and having issues and I just took my mirrorless camera out and hooked it up one night to the telescope and just took some images and I was like, wow, this is kind of cathartic to be able to have some success like that. So you know, don't try to go too fast would be my suggestion. You know. Let it kind of naturally make its way through. You know your interest and you know if you feel like you want to try a new thing, only change one thing at a time. You know the scientific process and that way your your skill set doesn't grow beyond your actual ability to do anything with it, because you know some people try to buy their way through this hobby and it's really not going to work. The knowledge base is required.

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, and you know, the move from a DSLR to a one shot color cooled CMOS camera. You'll find it. I think you'll find it really easy and you'll find that it actually simplifies your imaging and improves your result. However, it's not free, right.

Rob Webb:

Right.

Ron Brecher:

So you asked about that. You asked about that before, though, rob, and I wanted to say there's a very robust used market for cameras.

Dave Farina:

Okay, I would say it's probably also a good idea, if you're already on a DSLR, to consider trying to hook it up to a laptop, because if you're going to be going to a one shot color astronomy camera, most of them you need to hook up to a laptop. There are a few out there that you can use an intermediary device, like a little Raspberry Pi device, but most of the time people are imaging using a laptop and that can be done also with a DSLR. There's a number of software out there that can handle that. A lot of the software, in fact, can handle the DSLRs and mirrorless cameras and it allows you to start to learn that process too.

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, sgp, nina. Of course Backyard EOS and Backyard Nikon.

Dave Farina:

Those are the ones I got started on.

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, yeah. But you know, I think, if you're, I think I'm kind of thinking what would I do differently if I was starting over again? I think I would have decided sooner rather than later that I'm crazy about this, and I would have just gone for what I wanted right at the beginning. Because, you mean in?

Rob Webb:

terms of spending money or buying.

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, you spend a lot of money buying and selling stuff. I agree with that. If I'd known how passionate I was going to be about this, I would have just bought all the right stuff at the beginning, as soon as I could. You know, I know you can't buy it all at once.

Rob Webb:

So if you were to start now, like, let's say, somebody else is just going into this now, knowing that you would spend, knowing they'd spend a lot of money. But where do you see astrophotography going from here? Like, right now we've got CMOS cameras. I'm starting to see cell phone cameras being used more often. Like, where do you see it going in the next 10 years, so that somebody who's wanting to get into it can like ride that wave now?

Ron Brecher:

Well, mounts. So the mount is the heart of any astrophotography rig. It doesn't take the pictures, but it's the clock that counteracts the rotation of the Earth. Right, so it keeps everything. Keeps your stars. Ring Mounts are evolving quite a lot over the last few years. We're seeing strain wave mounts that work without counterweights, no clutches, no, it doesn't matter as much. On the software and camera, I don't know how much the camera hardware is going to evolve, but I think the sum of the firmware is going to change. Richard Wright Accidental Astro is his thing at all. Richard Wright has written about this in Sky and Telescope and just to really quickly summarize, there's going to be a lot of things that happen in the camera that right now we're doing manually. So, for example, you might take five images in the camera and have them calibrated in the camera, registered and aligned, and then saved as a single frame.

Dave Farina:

In fact, I had Richard on the last podcast that we had about live stacking and astrophotography in the future of it, and I believe that's what you're referencing. So, yeah, guys, check that out if you haven't already listened or watched the podcast with Richard Wright, because it's extremely exciting. What he believes is going to be the next things in Astro.

Ron Brecher:

And to hear you say that Ron is exciting to have that second opinion, just to be clear, though it's not really a qualified opinion, it's an understanding that Richard is a very, very insightful astrophotographer and if he thinks this is coming, it's coming. I've heard him talk about other things that were coming, that came, so if Richard says it's coming, I really believe it. He's probably working on the software to do it.

Rob Webb:

I think that would be amazing. I've really enjoyed just the fact that the new phones they take a bunch of frames and stack it in there already and you get a decent picture. I think it's amazing and I see everything just getting easier and faster with that type of technology. Maybe not as good, right, because when you have better data you can make a better picture, but we're better.

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, but there's a lot to be said for fast and easy. When you're, say, a young parent with limited time, limited money, limited weather. Sometimes fast is good enough, right, I'm lucky I have the luxury of I now have the luxury of an observatory. I've got some good equipment and.

Ron Brecher:

OK skies, I'm just having a ball with it, I just have fun with it. Ai is coming to astrophotography. Yeah, it's not coming, it's here. Russ Krohman has three AI based tools for Pixins. I think some of them work with other stores as well.

Ron Brecher:

Blur Exterminator, which is a deconvolution tool. It makes images look sharper, although deconvolution is not the same as sharpening. We can have a conversation about that sometime. So he's got that deconvolution tool. He's got a star illumination tool. Star Exterminator Yep, that's all the stars are going to do.

Ron Brecher:

So, from an image processing point of view, it's really nice to break your image up into I think of it in three sections background, target, object and stars. And if you can have those, if you can deal with each of them as a separate challenge, you can end up with a really nice picture. So Star Exterminator helps with that. And then the last one is Noisix Exterminator, which really has to be seen to be believed. It's by far the best noise elimination tool that I've ever seen in Pixinsite. And not only that, but it actually gives you a little bit of detail enhancement as well. So AI is coming more and more into master photography and I think that's kind of exciting and it's also kind of scary, but you know, is it going to make it more fun. I like, for me it's all. I really enjoy this so.

Dave Farina:

So the last thing I'll ask is you know I personally, am you know, science teacher? I come with the background of you know, trying to look at these things from that perspective. I also have, you know, an interest in the pretty picture astrophotography stuff. Do you have any interest in the science? Have you done anything with? You know more of the data collection side or trying to capture some sort of an event?

Ron Brecher:

Not exactly, but I've been involved in a NASA project to help remove cosmic ray damage from images that they take from the space station. Oh cool. So they have a project that was working out of the Rochester Institute of Technology and I got to hear Don Pettit. He was one of the astronauts that flew on the space station, took a lot of photos and he gave a talk at NIA about a few years ago. Anyway, they use Nikon DSLRs on the space station in the Italian model called the cupola that always faces Earth, and so they've got a bunch of Nikon cameras. They're taking pictures all the time, but these sensors in the camera build up damage from cosmic ray hits and so they look the pictures out of them have like red, green and blue spouting throughout them.

Ron Brecher:

So, don Pettit, in his talk he said you know, if anybody has any ideas about how we could fix them, let me know. And I thought about it a little bit and came up with a way to do it in its insight, and so was invited to be part of that. That's awesome, that team. Yeah, it was really cool. I got my name on NASA letterhead.

Rob Webb:

Oh, fantastic For the meeting.

Ron Brecher:

Yeah, that's a win. And you also asked about the science. So every time I post a picture, I write about the object. I'm a scientist by day. I'm very interested in the cosmos from, let's say, an academic perspective. I'm very interested when I'm doing astrophotography. For me, it's mostly about making pretty pictures, but when I'm posting, I want to tell the story of the object, and I want to. I also give all my processing details, so I want to tell the story of how I made the picture.

Dave Farina:

Right, you capture the mind and the heart at the same time with some of these pictures. It's amazing.

Ron Brecher:

That's what it does. For me, it's like an intellectual pursuit that exposes beauty that you could never see. Right, it's a lot of good check boxes for me.

Rob Webb:

Right, right, yeah, I think that's why we all enjoy it too, and I think one of the cool things about astrophotography, especially some of the deep sky stuff, is you're picking up on things with those cameras that you can't see without a camera. I think that's pretty amazing. I want to share a little meme with you and I want to see what you think of this. Tell us what people are missing about this one. Now for the audience who's listening.

Rob Webb:

What we're going to look at is a picture, and just think of the moon. Think of the full moon on a beautiful night. It's a little bit cloudy. You can see the moon, you can see the craters, you can see the maria, you can sort of see the clouds around, and it's just phenomenal. And then you go to take a picture of it with your cell phone and it's just junk, right. I mean, even with my DSLR, I see something like that top picture with the moon that looks just gorgeous and beautiful. And I take out my DSLR and it just doesn't match up. What do you think for normal people out there? Like what do they forget? Like what do they not know?

Ron Brecher:

based on that, the moon is really tiny, yeah, and far away. If you hold your arm up at arm's length with your baby finger sticking out, your fingernail of your baby finger will cover the moon. That's how small it is on the sky, yeah. So now do that with anything else in your surroundings and take a picture with your cell phone. It's gonna be small.

Dave Farina:

Yep For sure.

Ron Brecher:

And if it's not, it's gonna be blurry because the autofocus mechanisms don't work properly.

Dave Farina:

And the other weird thing is how it looks different at the horizon. But it's actually no different. It's just an optical illusion. You can do the exact same thing with your finger. You can hold it out and it's the same exact size as it is when it's up in the sky, and lots of people you know, and myself included, kind of that optical illusion catches you. But once you do that little test it's obvious that it's just that.

Rob Webb:

I've always been impressed with the way our eyes can really, really our brains interpret the image to have such high dynamic range where we can see the Mario, but then we can also see the stars behind the moon. But when you get a camera out, you just even a DSLR like you can't quite get that same high dynamic range. And there are ways to do that, I know, but it's pretty amazing. Our brains are amazingly terrible pattern-seeking machines.

Ron Brecher:

Oh yeah, crazy.

Rob Webb:

How can people find you on the internet, and is there anything that else that you would like to plug tonight?

Ron Brecher:

My website is astrodocca. You can find me at mastersofpixinsightcom, and you can also find me at my email address or on Facebook. My email address is arbreacheratrodgerscom. That's R-B-R-E-Z-H-E-R at Rogers arrow-g-e-r-scom, and you can message me on Facebook. If you want lessons, just reach out, go to the website. Every picture I post tons of information, all my articles that I'm writing up there. There's nothing for purchase on that website. It's all. Everything up there is free to access. Enjoy it.

Dave Farina:

Ron, I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Rob, as he said, is just getting started. Your recommendation to do some stacking of images was, I think, spot on and I know that your experience here in Pixinsight is second to none. I'd love to have you back at some point to discuss how that process works, if you're interested. Would you be interested to come back on sometime with us and maybe take Rob through that process?

Ron Brecher:

I'd love to come back on the show. I like doing things like this, and maybe what we can do is take a one-shot color master and put it through an abbreviated workflow that gives a really nice result in nine or 10 steps, but to be fair, it's still nine or 10 tools that you have to learn how to use. I have friends who are great carpenters. You could give me the best hammer in the world. I could never build you a house because I don't know how to use it.

Ron Brecher:

Right, but you could give them a pretty mediocre hammer and they'll still build you a really good hammer, right? Yeah, so you have to put in the time to learn how to use the tools.

Dave Farina:

Well, we really appreciate you coming on. I'm looking forward to that next time. Guys, this is only possible by having the support of our audience and if you could help us out, we are trying to grow our Patreon. I know that there's people who are listening right now. If you haven't seen Ron's images, check out his website once again at stroaddocca and Rob, thank you again for your amazing and very difficult trivia.

Rob Webb:

You're very welcome, happy to help. All right, everybody.

Dave Farina:

Thank you so much, and clear skies, as Ron would say.

Ron Brecher:

See you later gang.

Rob Webb:

See ya.

Ron Brecher:

See ya tomorrow.

People on this episode

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David Farina

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Rob Webb

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