Back in the mid '90's, when I was in college, was the first time I was active in the hobby of amateur astronomy. Active, in the sense that I actually owned a telescope and spent late nights in the dark getting chewed on by mosquitoes or freezing my butt off trying to observe the details of some fuzzy blob in the sky.

Fiscal responsibility at the time forced me to sell my equipment and drop out of being "active" in the hobby. I never lost the interest, just the means to seriously pursue astronomy. I never got out of the habit of looking up every time I walked outside at night, or spending some time in the wee hours of a balmy August morning looking for Perseid meteors, or jumping into the car and speeding to a nearby dark site with the report of an auroral display.

Fifteen or so years later, and I found myself in the position to be able to once again become active in amateur astronomy and took advantage of the opportunity.

Photography has always been an interest of mine and photographing astronomical objects and other sky-based phenomena was a natural extension of that interest, considering my involvement in astronomy. My first serious attempt at astrophotography, that is, outside of simple star trails was the North American/Pelican Nebula complex in Cygnus.

The image at left is the results of this attempt. Keep in mind that this image was taken at a time before digital cameras and cooled CCDs were widely available at the amateur level. Those that were affordable, anyway. This image, then was taken using conventional film. Specialized, scientific film that had been hypersensitized by baking it in an hydrogen atmosphere for about 24 hours. This made the film, which was originally 25 ASA, about 400 ASA and almost impervious to reciprocity failure. The film, Kodak Technical Pan 2415, was one of the most popular black & white film emulsions available to amateur astronomers due to this and it's incredibly small grain. The image reproduction shown here suffers from .jpg compression and the fact that I can't find the original scan. I will have to have the negative scanned again in the near future before it degrades too much.

The instrument used for this versionw as a Celestron 5.5" Schmidt Camera which worked at f/1.5 or about 200mm focal length. This camera was piggybacked on my fork-mounted Meade 8" LX200, and the mount was hand-guided by me using an illuminated reticle eyepice. The image consists of a single 30 minute exposure taken through a Kodak Wratten #93 filter gel filter (to isolate the hydrogen alpha wavelengths) and developed by myself in Kodak Dektol.

Jump forward 15 or so years to last night, August 28, 2010.

Astrophotograhy equipment has made leaps and bounds in the intervening years. Last night's efforts are show here to the right. This one was taken using a Canon 300mm f/4 EF-L lens attached to an SBIG ST8300M CCD camera through a Baader 12nm h-Alpha filter. It is the result of twenty 5-minute exposures which were guided with a TMB80SS refractor and an Orion Starshoot Autoguider. I literally set everything up, framed the image and found a guide star, then pressed a button and watched a movie while the camera an computer did all the work.

Things have certainly changed in the intervening years.

The images were stacked and combined in Deep Sky Stacker and post-processed using Photoshop CS4. Minimal changes were made using Levels and Curves. No other processing was done at this time.

I'm not saying that either method is better than the other. Back then, amateurs certainly achieved some very fine results with the equipment available. Indeed, there are still some purists who prefer to work with film, saying that continuous tone images are superior to digital. In some respects, they're right. Digital images can only be enlarged so much before the size of the pixels becomes ungainly and makes the image look blocky. Although film images may be able to be enlarged more, they are still limited to the grain size of the emulsion. Tech Pan is gone ... discontinued by Kodak a few years ago, and even other films are starting to get hard to find. Most film developing has be either be done by the photographer or taken to a lab that sends it to a larger lab.

I think digital has come to a point where pixel size is small enough and the sensors large enough to allow amateurs to create images that rival professional images that were being made back when I took that first photo of NGC7000. The process may not be nearly as hands on as it used to be, but, is that necessarily a bad thing?