About this site
One garden, two telescopes
This gallery is made in a garden in Friedrichsdorf, at the edge of the Taunus hills — not a dark site but Bortle 5 to 6, with the Rhine-Main light dome to the south. What you see here was made under exactly those conditions, with equipment that fits in the back of a car.
The telescopes
Most of the deep-sky images now come from a RedCat 71 with an ASI2600MC Air — a short astrograph with a wide field, ideal for extended complexes like Cygnus or the North America Nebula.
Smaller fields now use an Askar 120APO at 840 mm focal length with an ASI585MC Air, as in NGC 891 and NGC 6946.
The GSO 8-inch Newtonian at 800 mm also belongs to this imaging history. Historical Orion, Ring Nebula, lunar and Jupiter images used that system, partly with a modified Canon DSLR. The current M33 mosaic retains one Newtonian panel on the left; most of the image comes from the Askar.
Between them lie years of pause. This year's way back in ran through a small automatic telescope that needs no alignment and no cables — useful for starting again, but no image shown here rests on it alone.
What is measured in these images
Every image is astrometrically solved: the stars in the frame yield a real sky coordinate for every pixel. Only that puts the circles and names in the overlays on catalogue positions rather than on guesses — and it is why the sky navigator knows where each field of view really sits. The center, field size and rotation shown under each image are measured values, not estimates.
Color is a different matter and is never presented as a measurement. A dual-band filter passes only two lines; what becomes of them is a deliberate mapping. Where an image was made that way, it says so.
Why there are texts
A beautiful image answers no question. Every entry therefore carries crops that show what is worth looking at, and a text that says what you are seeing. The knowledge articles stand beside them and explain the mechanism properly once — from hydrogen through ionization fronts to technique and lucky imaging.
German is the version everything is written in first; English and French follow. Where a translation is still missing, the German text stands with a note — readable beats empty.
Contact
Andreas Fink, Friedrichsdorf, Germany. Address and contact are in the imprint.