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M67. 60-second exposure with an Apogee KX260
CCD camera at the prime focus of a Meade LX 200-12-inch
telescope. The limiting magnitude is approximately 18. T. Hunter
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In my opinion, black & white astrophotography reached its peak
with the publication of Mallas and Kreimer’s classic work The
Messier Album (Mallas and Kreimer, 1978). The pictures of the
Messier Objects by Kreimer are the standard for which even
modern CCD imaging and ultrafine grain photography with
hypersensitized Kodak 2415 film has a hard time meeting.
Kreimer’s pictures were lengthy exposures taken with painstaking
effort, and their printing involved extensive darkroom work. He
used Kodak Tri-X film with an ISO speed of 400.
I first tried astrophotography in the late 1950’s, and the
results were terrible. I could not build or purchase a telescope
with a good enough drive to track on the sky for long exposures
through the telescope at its main focal point (prime focus). My
first successful ventures included a picture of the Echo I
satellite in 1962 and an aurora picture published in Sky &
Telescope in 1961 (Hunter, 1961): |
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