Star Vistas

The history of the making of Star Vistas goes back to May 2002 when Greg Parker of the New Forest Observatory got his first serious telescope, a Celestron Nexstar 11 GPS – Hyperstar compatible! 

Greg’s initial interest was in observing only, and to this end he bought some binoviewers for the 11 GPS and therefore also had to double up on all his eyepieces to use the binoviewers!  The views through the 11″ reflector with the binoviewers were quite staggering, and Greg was very happy to just observe – for about 2 years   The problem he had was that there were only a handful of objects that looked “really good” visually, and he found himself going back to these handful of objects time after time, which to be frank, eventually got boring!  Terrible thing to say with all the wonders of the Universe out there to see, but what you could actually see didn’t compare to those deep-sky images you see in books and magazines.

At the same time as Greg bought the C11, he also bought a thing called a Hyperstar lens from Starizona.  This lens assembly takes the place of the secondary mirror in the reflector and turns a “slow” f#10 reflecting telescope into an ultra-fast f#2 astrograph.  It is designed to take a CCD camera, and you don’t use this device for visual observing.

In November 2004 after 2 and a half years of visual observing, Greg bit the bullet and bought an SXV-H9C one-shot colour CCD camera from Starlight Xpress.  He fitted this to the Hyperstar, and on a cold November evening he took his first (single sub) image of the Great Nebula in Orion.  He was awestruck.  This was incredible, and one of the best images he had ever seen (since then he has come to realise that in fact the image was rubbish – but you never forget that “first light” experience with your new kit – ever).

Greg managed to get quite proficient with acquiring data (taking pictures) with the Hyperstar, but never really enjoyed the considerable amount of image processing work that needs to be carried out on the raw data to turn it into a Deep-Sky “work of art”.  It was around this time that an internet friend, Bud Guinn, invited Greg to join the Our Dark Skies forum.  Unknown to Greg at the time, the ODS forum was home to Noel Carboni, probably the best processor of deep-sky images on the planet, and author of a set of Photoshop Actions that allow astronomers to more easily process their images.

It was fortunate that one day Noel noticed one of Greg’s (poorly processed) Hyperstar images of the galaxy M33 on the forum and decided to do something about it.  Noel transformed what was basically a mess, into one of the best images of M33 that you will find on the web.  And the collaboration was born!!  Noel subsequently asked for all Greg’s Hyperstar images which he duly processed and together we generated a rather impressive portfolio of deep-sky images.

Wanting to bring these images to a wider audience, Greg and Noel sorted out a publication agreement with Springer in early 2008 to publish a large format coffee-table book of all their deep-sky images.  Called “Star Vistas”, this book was published in March 2009.

In a nutshell, that is the history of Star Vistas.

We do have a little bonus concerning this book however   Greg was for many years in e-mail correspondence with Sir Arthur C Clarke.  He has also been a friend of Dr. Brian May for a couple of years, and he got to meet and know the great Sir Patrick Moore through Brian.  The Forewords for Star Vistas have been written by Sir Arthur C Clarke, Sir Patrick Moore and Dr. Brian May!  It is likely that this is the last Foreword written by the late Sir Arthur – and Star Vistas is dedicated to his memory!  My God – it’s full of stars!  Certainly applies to Star Vistas.