Early 1980s Film-Based Astrophotography

[Hankmeister3]

I'm posting the best examples of my film-based astrophotography which I originally captured during the late 1970s in San Clemente, California and early 1980s in Mound, Minnesota. I used an Olympus OM2N 35mm SLR camera with a 50mm f/2.0 Olympus Zuiko lens. I also used a 75-150mm Olympus zoom telephoto and an Olympus 400mm f/4 fixed telephoto which I piggy-backed on my home-built "sector-driven" fork-mounted Newtonian using a Meade Optical 10-inch f/5.5 mirror figured to 1/8 wave. I mainly used the Meade Newtonian for visual astronomy and some lunar and planetary photography (which in hindsight wasn't all that impressive), but I also used it as the guide scope for my Olympus OM2N camera-lens set-ups.

These images are not from the original negatives (they must have been lost during three of our moves since the 1980s) but from 5x7 color prints which I enlarged and processed myself. One of my better astrophotographs is of M42 Orion Nebula but unfortunately the only remaining print I have is 11x14 and I don't have a flat-bed scanner large enough to convert it to a digital file. I suppose I could re-photograph it with one of my Canon DSLRs and post it some day if I can ever get around to doing that.

After originally scanning these astrophotos with a CanoScan 9000F flatbed about four years ago, I recently took an opportunity to digitally tweak them in the ArcSoft PhotoStudio 6.0 photo-processing suite which was originally packaged with the Canon scanner. Unfortunately, there's not a lot one can do with an image lifted from a color print that's probably about 35 years old!

I hope you enjoy looking at my old-school astrophotography knowing that it still doesn't represent the state-of-the-art of what was possible with hypered film and higher-end equipment. I don't have the original data specs for the individual pictures, so I'll do my best to recollect general exposure times and the lenses used to capture each photograph.

Equipment:

Olympus OM2N 35mm SLR camera
Kodacolor 400 non-hypered safety film (ASA 400 which is roughly equivalent to ISO 400)
Negatives processed in C-41 and printed in my darkroom on Kodacolor color print paper using a Durst M601 Dichroic Enlarger with color head attachment.
Most of the photos have been cropped to one degree or another to overcome some edge flaws and slight vignetting which would occur from time-to-time.

All exposure times are approximate because I don't have my notes any more and I'm working from an old man's memory! Heh! Don't scrutinize too hard or the flaws become more apparent. The best shot of the North American Nebula I got was on the first frame of a 36 exposure roll so the Mexico end of the image is a bit washed out being the first frame and too near to the exposed leader of that roll when originally loaded into the camera. My normal practice was to click past the first two frames once the film cassette was loaded in the camera and then the first exposed frame would theoretically be clean.

[TheButcher]

Very, Very Impressive Henry! I would of thought you just taken them recently and with the latest tech/Astronomy equipment!

[Ylem]

Very nice

I used to do AP, I had my own darkroom, those were fun times

I have no clue how to do it now a days and most likely could never figure all this digital processing out

[Hankmeister3]

Very, Very Impressive Henry! I would of thought you just taken them recently and with the latest tech/Astronomy equipment!

Thanks. I could never reproduce these results today with film because of the sheer stamina it took to manually "ride herd" on the sidereal drive for 10, 15, 30 minutes using an off-axis lit reticle eyepiece. Good polar alignment was also difficult and I must have thrown away half of my images on that basis alone.

Also, I probably burned through several hundred feet of Kodacolor400 film just to acquire these few images! However, the comet images were a lot easier and more efficient since I simply slapped my camera on a tripod with the appropriate telephoto attached and bracketed exposures hoping one or two would be the cat's meow.

I used a daylight bulk film loader to roll my own film cassettes to cut down on costs plus I was doing my own C-41 film processing. Using an eye loupe on the negatives I could pick out the best potential frames and then work from there. Sometimes I would do a bit of film "push-processing" to something roughly equivalent to ISO 800, but too much and the film grain got really objectionable. Once you get your Dichroic color head locked in on its filtration values, that really simplified the printing process. However, it was still a vastly inefficient way of acquiring astro-images, but at the time it was fun and educational.

Keep in mind, I tweaked all these images with my ArcSoft PhotoStudio digital software suite. The 35 year-old photos had fairly weak images (they weren't all that spectacular the day I printed them on 5x7 glossy Kodacolor paper) and re-processing them with PhotoStudio made a significant difference. If you look closely you'll still see scratches and dust motes on some of the images. I tried to find them all and "erase" them but that sorta became a fool's errand. Also, PhotoStudio's despeckling and Gaussian Blur features helped mitigate the film grain, too.

[helicon]

Nice shots of Kohoutek and Hale-Bopp.

[Piet Le Roux]

The colours are great without Photoshop and stacking !

[mbocca]

Henry,

Those are amazing. There are so many things in a single session that I could not imagine doing with out a quick preview of the shot using a high gain. Things like framing, focusing, etc. Seeing images like that make me really appreciate the luxuries of the digital camera.

For the Horsehead Nebula, I guess you would frame based on Alnitak, and probably use that to focus and collimate as well.

Great work.
Mike

[StarBru]

Very nice and impressive old school AP and processing, Henry!

In the 90's, I made a very disappointing stab at AP with my C6 Newtonian on a dual motorized Polaris mount using a similar camera as yours, an Olympus OM-1. I only took one roll of film and when it didn't produce the photos I saw in the magazines, I gave up! I wish I would have stuck with it, but think of all the money I saved! The thing I most regret of not starting and sticking with AP and not learning to sketch is that I can only describe what I see through the eyepiece, which falls short of the actual experience!

[yobbo89]

Impressive, I didn't know film could show so much detail!

[Hankmeister3]

Tweaking the scanned images with Canon's flatbed proprietary PhotoStudio software brought out more details, Yobbo. I can re-scan the original photo of, say, the Horsehead nebula and let you see what it looked like in its "native" format. Of course I can't account for the original printing process as to the various settings I used to arrived at the final print. I think you'll see what I mean about how much modern digital processing software can really improve "old" photos and slides. I tried Ektachrome E6 slide film and found that it was way too easy to over-expose the frames (which made the images really "thin") even with a moderate amount of exposures and I wasn't using LP "nebular filters" because trying to dial those in would have over-complicated an already complicated process.

These old school prints were scanned in at 600 dpi with my CanoScan 9000F flatbed. It's still pretty cutting-edge even after 9 years.

[Hankmeister3]

I batch-processed the collage above in my ArcSoft PhotoStudio 6.0 suite and it compares favorably to the images I originally posted at the start of this thread. The ability to digitally improve or alter old film-based photographic images can sometimes produce some relatively spectacular results. And I'm no expert at this craft either.

[Juno16]

Henry, I am blown away by your images. Totally impressive!

I did film (not Astro), back in the day too. We have talked about it before. I really enjoy seeing the terms I have since forgotten. C-41, kodacolor, and asa are very memorable. I was still in high school. The only way that I could afforkd it was. To visit the photo hobby shop on base Nay dependent) where I could use everything for free.

I assume that you must have done some sort of manual guiding too. Wow!

The color that you brought out with software are impressive, but, I hope that you don’t mind me saying that personally, I like the original scanned images the best.

Awesome work man, impressive! It’s no wonder that you like to use a minimalist technique with dslr astrophotography.

Wow, what a change in technology!

[jthommes]

Interesting and cool tour through film AP.

[Hankmeister3]

Henry, I am blown away by your images. Totally impressive!

I did film (not Astro), back in the day too. We have talked about it before. I really enjoy seeing the terms I have since forgotten. C-41, kodacolor, and asa are very memorable. I was still in high school. The only way that I could afforkd it was. To visit the photo hobby shop on base Nay dependent) where I could use everything for free.

I assume that you must have done some sort of manual guiding too. Wow!

The color that you brought out with software are impressive, but, I hope that you don’t mind me saying that personally, I like the original scanned images the best.

Awesome work man, impressive! It’s no wonder that you like to use a minimalist technique with dslr astrophotography.

Wow, what a change in technology!

Thanks Jim. Yes, I had to do a lot of manual guiding because there was no such thing as a PEC back then, at least not that I was aware of except maybe on some super high-end telescope that was well beyond my budget. The sector-gear "clock-drive" I put together actually turned out to have very little periodic error. I lapped the worm with the sector gear as best I could and then had to manually correct/guide about a third of a turn on the worm gear. I forget now exactly how long the radius of the sector gear was in relation to the full rotation of the clock-drive's worm gear. My sector gear had to have had a 12 to 14 inch radius, so it wasn't super intense for the whole rotation of the worm - but I couldn't manual guide like that today. I've totally forgotten what the gear ratio was but it was pretty accurate over several hours worth of tracking for visual observation. But for astrophotography, the limit for me was about an hour, however I preferred exposures in the 10 to 40 minute range for both B&W and color. Even in my middle 20s, an hour's worth of manual guiding would have turned me into a zombie.

I think we were calling what I had built a "sector drive" and the periodic error was fairly low once the sector gear and worm were properly lapped in and the engineering and build were properly executed. This drive is different than "barn door trackers" which were being pioneered back in the 1970s. I remember seeing the plans for a barn door tracker in the Sky & Telescope magazine around the middle of years of 1970, when I was attending the University of Houston. I almost built a barn door when I took up color AP in the late 1970s and early 1980s but I decided to go with the bit more accurate and dependable sector gear drive.

Apart from outboard modern auto-guiding, PEC is an APer's best friend today … and all that other neat digital stuff, too! I get tired of just thinking what had to be done "back-in-the-day." Reciprocity failure of Kodacolor films was a big problem. The longer the exposure the more failure of the various dye layers to respond to additional photonic bombardment. I never quite understood why that happened. It does appear film has a wider dynamic range. It's most noticeable in an M42 image of the Orion Nebula I grabbed. In it the Trapezium is still discernable despite how hot the core is and how much of the surrounding nebula I was able to capture in a 12 minute exposure.

[Hankmeister3]

Thanks, Bruce. I had an old friend who had an OM-1. That's what prompted me to buy my OM-2N. I latter bought my wife an OM-10 because of all the automatic features it had. Point and shoot once you dialed in the correct ASA value and manually focused the lens. No auto-focusing back then (as you well know), at least in my price range. We thought it was cool enough to have automatic exposure in a 35mm SLR.

[STEVE333]

Very impressive work Henry. I appreciate how much the technology has advanced since the 70s. No way I could deal with all the photographic stuff today. Your perseverance in capturing those photos is as impressive as the photos!

Well done and thanks for sharing.

Steve

[Hankmeister3]

Very impressive work Henry. I appreciate how much the technology has advanced since the 70s. No way I could deal with all the photographic stuff today. Your perseverance in capturing those photos is as impressive as the photos!

Well done and thanks for sharing.

Steve

Thanks, Steve. I utterly agree … "No way I could deal with all the (old school) photographic stuff today." I guess that dynamic explains my aversion to "work" even as a retired person when it comes state-of-the-art imaging processing techniques the more advanced APers engage in. I admit to being too lazy to push myself to such levels of excellence. Plus my ability to stay focused on a task for hours-on-end in "gathering data" and properly processing it is generally measured in minutes, not hours … if that makes sense!