We had an interesting and well-illustrated talk from Michael H this week, on the subject of smart telescopes. This digital technology has really moved forward rapidly in the last couple of years. Portable, battery-powered, designed to produce deep space images with relative ease - perhaps they are similar in that respect to the photography leap-forward that drones gave us, and before that, smart-phone photography. All arguably in the realm of 'computational photography' and in the range of many amateur photographers' skills and budget. As far I recall from Michael's talk, the process involves choosing a dark site with clear views, setting up the telescope and associated phone/table app (called Singularity). Next, choose a suitable deep sky target from those offered by the app, choose some image parameters such as how many images to collate, duration, file format, etc. Then start the capture and wait while the image builds on the phone. Amazing in itself, but as Michael pointed out, you're then looking at an image collected from just a few photons that have travelled distances that are difficult to comprehend.
The featured image is from Michael - Orion Nebula, 1350 light years away (I looked it up - that's 7,936,144,253,797,870 miles away), in the Milky Way galaxy. Michael photographed this on a Vaonis Vespera.
After Michael, Grace gave us an update on future club events... please get your 5 photos in for the Match an Image competition by 22nd January, to be sent by WeTransfer to progsec@haddingtoncameraclub.org.uk The competition will be hosted by ourselves on 20th February at the Poldrate where we will welcome North Berwick camera club.
Grace also took us through a presentation given at Garvald, which was an interesting illustrated recap on the club's history, and what we've been doing over the last few years in particular.
Also note the online closing date for entries for the SPF Print Championship (held in-person at Dunblane, 18th Feb) is 5th February - full details here.
Next meeting - in the Poldrate, 7.30pm, Rudolf will share his Bird Photography, and there will be a follow-up of images edited by some members.