My name is Jonathan and I have a passion for exploring, photographing and sharing the marvels of the universe around us.
Nearly everything on this site was captured from my own back yard, under Bortle 4 skies. I started down this road in 2018, and the pages here follow that learning curve fairly honestly. Early on it was wide field work with a camera lens, then galaxies and nebulae through an 8in Newtonian, and eventually a monochrome camera, a filter wheel and narrowband. The gear has changed more than once. The back yard has not.
Most of the finished images have a full write up behind them with the acquisition details and the processing steps, because when I was starting out those were the pages I always went looking for and rarely found. In the same spirit, some of the raw integrated masters are published under a Creative Commons license in the Public Data section, so anyone who wants to process the data their own way can.
Patchwork
In 2019, for the tenth birthday of the /r/astrophotography subreddit, I collaborated with imagers from all over the subreddit on a community project called Patchwork. Contributors sent in their finished work, and every one of those images was reprojected onto a single shared sky canvas and tiled as a deep zoom pyramid. The result is one continuous view that you can pan across and zoom into, all the way down to any one contributor’s frame at their own resolution, with everybody’s work sitting where it actually belongs on the sky. There is a Cygnus edition as well, and it is still growing.
EigenFrame
Behind all of this there has always been a pile of scripts. An imaging log I generated to keep track of what I had shot and how much of it, and a growing set of routines for calibrating and stacking. Over the last few years that pile turned into a real application, and it now has a name: EigenFrame.
EigenFrame is a desktop app for managing an astrophotography library. It catalogs the frames already sitting on your drives, organizes them by night and by target, builds calibration masters, scores frame quality from detected stars, registers frames against a reference, and stacks them into an integrated master. It shows you the data at full resolution the whole way through, so you can judge for yourself what is worth keeping and what belongs in the bin.
If you would like to have a look at it, it lives at eigenframe.darkflats.com.