Ricardo Demarco's Astro-Photography

IMAGING THE HEAVENS:

I have no memory of when exactly I started doing astrophotography, but I do remember that my first truly successful (according to what I was trying to achieve) astro-photograph was captured during a camping trip in the Maule River Valley and the Laguna del Maule in the Chilean Andes. It was a clear night, and I was using a borrowed Nikon SLR and a color negative film. The subject was the constellation of Orion, and it was a long-exposure, trail photograph. It was some years before I entered college in 1993, most likely c.1989. Digital cameras were not an option at that time, so I had to wait a long time (compared to today's standards) before I could see the actual result. The speed (ISO number) of the film would only allow for long exposures, thus producing images where the stars would look like elongated traces. With time, a lot patience and perseverance, I could slowly improve my astro-photographs and have access to interesting sites such as professional observatories in Northern Chile. I vividly remember those taken at the Las Campanas and Cerro Tololo observatories in 1997 and 1999, respectively.

In the year 2003 I acquired my very first digital camera, but it was not until 2005 when I really started getting reasonably good and interesting night sky images. The La Silla Observatory was the starting location, and the equipment used was a Nikon D70 digital SLR camera. In 2010 I replaced my D70 with a Nikon D7000, thus significantly increasing the quality of the photographs. With time, I would move from still photographs to timelapse photography which allowed me to reproduce the motion of the sky through the night.

I have been dedicated to basically make landscape photographs directly with a camera and a tripod, as opposed to mounting the camera on a telescope, either at one of its foci to get close-up views of astronomical objects, or on "piggy-back" to get point-like stellar images in long exposures. The scenery in my night-time pictures usually is that of an astronomical observatory, as it is the perfect environment to make astro-photographs and is the one with very little light pollution that I get to visit more often. Nowadays, thanks to the high sensitivity (high ISO value) and noise-reduction algorithms of cameras such as the D7000 and D7200 (which I own), near point-like (PSF-limited) stellar images are possible to get in no longer the 30 seconds of integration. I have also got practice at using low-level illumination (no flash photography allowed!) to cast light on foreground subjects (such as people) to be included in the night-sky landscape. And I even go to exposure times of as long as 30 minutes to keep producing classical stellar-trail photographs.

My interest in the subject has taken me to develop and teach a course on astrophotography to the general public at the Universidad de Concepción. Below you can find a small sample of some astro-photos that I have been able to obtain over the years since my very beginnings in astrophotography. These are lower resolution versions of the original images. If you would like to see more and/or have access to the original files, please feel free to contact me. You can also find more information about my journey in photography on my photography page. Enjoy!

The South Celestial Pole from Cerro Tololo Inter-american Observatory. This image was created by stacking the idividual frames of one of my timelapse movies on Cerro Tololo using the StarStax software developed by Markus Enzweiler. Some extra editing was performed with standard tools available on Mac OS X. Hot pixels have not been been removed.

The South Celestial Pole from Cerro Tololo Inter-american Observatory - another view. This image was also processed with StarStax. Hot pixels have not been been removed.

▲ Amateur astronomers in the Biobio, Chile.	▲ The Magellan Telescopes, Chile.
▲ The Magellan/Baade Telescope, Chile.	▲ Baade Telescope's dome in action, Chile.
▲ The Cerro Tololo Observatory, Chile.	▲ Magellan/Clay's dome in action, Chile.
▲ The Gemini South Telescope, Chile.	▲ The Gemmini South Telescope, Chile.
▲ The ESO VLT on Paranal, Chile.	▲ The Halema'uma'u crater of Kilauea, USA.
▲ The Cerro Tololo Observatory, Chile.	▲ Visitors at the Magellan Telescopes, Chile.
▲ The sky from Cerro Tololo, Chile.	▲ The Cerro Tololo Observatory, Chile.
▲ The Galactic Center from Tololo, Chile.	▲ The ESO La Silla Observatory, Chile.
▲ The South Celestial Pole from La Silla, Chile.	▲ The South Celestial Pole from La Silla, Chile.
▲ The South Celestial Pole from the Las Campanas Observatory, Chile.	▲ The Blanco 4-m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Observatory, Chile.
▲ Orion, my very first astrophotograph, from the Maule Valley, Chile.	▲ The South Celestial Pole from Laguna del Maule, Chile.