The Taurus Camera
by
Steve Solon

You know, there are two schools of thought when it comes to the pursuit of astronomy: you either never gave it up after childhood to pursue wine, women (or men), and song; or you came back to it when the age was right and you had settled down. I graduated from the latter, as I think many of us did.

I was bitten at the age of six by Saturn in an inexpensive, cardboard 3" refractor. I will never forget that I had found it; little me! The rest is history.

About three years ago, just before we moved back home from Los Angeles. it bit me again, and I remembered the fascination, the amazement, and the unbelieveability of it all. I had been reading the astronomy magazines since before the moon, so all that was required was a new telescope. Since I wanted to do astrophotography, I bought a Celestron C-8 on a Super Polaris Mount and began to learn the art (truly!).

I began, as most do, with the Moon, since the exposures are short and it's relatively easy. This is where you learn focus, film speeds, and steadiness. It's not as complicated as some think; you just go out and do it. The magazines provided guides on film and such, so it was easy to get a start.

The results got better.

I had done regular photography all my adult life with a Minolta SRT-101, and mounting it to the telescope was no biggee. However, I had never guided before. Brother, is that an acquired talent, or what? Practice. Practice. Practice. A limitation I found early was that the Minolta doesn't have an interchangeable focus screen; so the view tends to look like a fingerprint. Try putting a deep sky object in the viewfinder when you can't find it. Guesswork comes in, and not very well, unless you want to spend the rest of your life shooting M42 because it's the only thing you can sort of see.

This is were I've got to plug the Taurus astrophotography system. Somebody really sat down and thought this one out. It eliminates most of the frustrations by providing easy focusing and guide star and target acquisition. Since I don't do my own film development, I need to do the best I can at the telescope. This system makes it a piece of cake... good cake!

I've since gotten pretty good at the art. With every passing New Moon period, I am able to shoot more and more formerly unavailable tagets, and while Tony Hallas isn't losing any sleep over my work, I am finding that my pictures look very close to some of the ones published in the magazines, and I'm pretty pround of them.

To those who've wanted to take this up; yes, it does require some special equipment in addition to your telescope, and the learning of the techniques of guiding and wakefulness are manditory. But I'll tell you this: you may have seen a thousand picture of the Lagoon Nebula, but when you look at one that you took, well, it really doesn't get any better.

(NOTE: The two pictures below are of the Orion Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula, respectively, taken with the Taurus Camera.)

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