Welcome to my website and thank you for stopping by! Most pictures you find here are taken
from a light polluted area close to the city of St.Gall, Switzerland. The equipment is housed in a small observatory
located at 727 m above mean sea level and is owned by the astronomical society
'Antares'. Because the telescopes are not
fixed permanently but moved out of the building on a clear night, everything has to be set up and
calibrated for each photographical session. This process is relatively time consuming.
In my daily business I am working on my PhD thesis about modeling and monitoring land mass movements.
Specifically, I am looking at a rock glacier in the Swiss Alps in order to better understand its physical behavior and
reaction of environmental changes.
I got into astronomy when I was about 15 years old. Together with my father, I started to read about the
wonders and beauty of the night sky. From the first moment since I was inspired by those 'pretty' pictures in that book.
Unfortunately the light coming from celestical objects (other than stars) is too dim to see their natural colors even if
you look through a large apertured telescope. I therefore aimed to get into astrophotography one day. After two years
of being excited to read about astronomy, we bought a
celestron C8
on a Vixen GP mount. The system was obviously not suitable for carrying a heavy camera while exposing for a couple of
minutes. Therefore I started with visual astronomy which in fact was the better way to begin with. Another year
passed and by chance we heard about the astronomical society 'Antares'
owing an observatory close to where we lived.
One year later I finally was able to start astrophotography with
a SBIG ST-8 camera and an
AstroPhysics AP130 refractor. The small chip of this camera
and the very time consuming process of generating colored pictures was the reason I moved on to a digital
single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera in 2004. The Canon EOS 300D was the first DSLR camera I used for astrophotography.
Two years later I bought a modified EOS 20D and finally, in 2008, I purchased a
Hutech modified EOS 40D. In the beginning of 2009 our astronomical
society decided to by a new CCD-camera which was another advance. After some time of investigation the well-known
STL-11000 CCD-camera
was chosen to be the new high-end member of our electrical equipment. This camera is one of the best in its category and
deeper images can be obtained also under light-polluted skies. Despite the larger effort, the possibility to go deeper
and to produce images with an overall better image quality was the reason why I again changed from the DSLR-camera to the
CCD-camera.
Since 2004 I use a Borg ED101 refractor as imaging telescope. It has a very good contrast and is easy to handle. Together
with the STL11000 camera, it is a very nice wide-field imaging setup. This is the current equipment I use for astrophotography.
New results will frequently be updated on this website.
Enjoy the beauty of our night sky!
Fabian Neyer,
July 2009