NOVEMBER ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION WINNER! (2007)

Thanks to you all.

It is a great honour for me to win this competition.
At the same time I am a little surprised as well, as I own a telescope for just a few months and never made pictures of the heavens before etc.

So I bought this scope on 11 sept. (?!), a lidl-LXD and experimented with it and suddenly I heard this story of a comet on the German news, somewhere late October.
(Isn’t it remarkable, I just own a scope and then this great object appeared at the sky.)
I tried to photograph it and it looked so good,
I had to show this (the first in the sequence) to other people
From that moment on I am a member of this forum…..
and seeing the other great pictures here making me jealous sometimes
I had to learn a lot in this short time,
especially the long exposure features of my camera (by hand and duck tape, no remote),
subtracting and adding in PS, no camera adaptor ring in the beginning till the 4th picture
(I used iron wire to keep the camera in place on the focuser etc. ).
Also a problem with the mount not following the stars correctly on long exposure times
(motion blur en sometimes a sudden 90 degrees motion on top of this, so all the stars looked like little birds)
I have made long exposures of andromeda and all the stars looked like this: ^^^^ on 8,9,10 minute’s exp.
So I took an enormous amount of pictures and selected the least bad ones
Using a stopwatch to see when the errors occurs
Etc. etc.
Well, I think everyone has its problems ..........but in this stage, as an absolute beginner in astrophotography
I never thought it would result in a winning photo...

Thanks again,

Henk

PS, if someone is interested in the original of almost 8000 pix wide........

BTW Seanie, I am not from Norway but from the Netherlands

Sorry Henk, I knew it began with an 'N'! Fixed now.

Sorry Henk, I knew it began with an 'N'! Fixed now.

:lol: :lol: :lol: