Ptolemy, the first century Greek astronomer and mathematician, made his observations of the night skies with the naked eye.
In 1609, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei upended the Earth-centered Ptolemaic view of the universe by determining that the planets circled the sun based on observations made with an early form of the telescope.
To capture images of distant galaxies far beyond the range of what these scientists of yore were able to glimpse, Ken Scheben uses his iPad.
He is amazed at what he has seen since he first pointed his camera up at the sky. "I couldn't believe this stuff was up there," he said. "I got really into it."
Scheben is an astrophotographer; one of a growing number of local shutterbugs who utilizes sophisticated imaging technology to take and edit photographs that bring us the cosmos with startling clarity and in a dazzling array of shapes and colors.
Some astrophotographers love shooting the moon and planets, but in the parlance of the hobby, Scheben is a deep space photographer. From the deck of his Babylon home, a quarter-mile from the Great South Bay, he shoots objects that are literally thousands -- even millions -- of light-years away. Some of his favorite subjects include the Orion Nebula (1,500 light-years away) and the Andromeda Galaxy (2.5 million light-years from our solar system).
Scheben, 65, retired as a salesman for Xerox in 2012 and took up nature photography as a hobby. He also shot homes for real estate firms, a business that came to a screeching halt during the COVID-19 pandemic. One day, while pondering his photographic future, he recalls, "I decided to look up." Higher than the branches on which the owls were perched, higher than the tree line and even higher than the whisks of clouds over the bay.
He looked into the great vastness of space. "I thought, 'Let me see what's up there.' "
Soon he was creating images that, in the words of his wife, Diana, "look like the covers of science-fiction novels from the '70s and '80s."
Shooting distant clusters of stars and nebulae (essentially vast clouds of gas in which stars are formed) required special equipment. Scheben became well-versed in the scopes, lenses, mounts and digital tools that could help him capture the farthest reaches of the night sky.
In that sense, Scheben and his fellow hobbyists are part of a technological revolution in photography -- and astronomy.
Dedicated amateur astrophotographers can almost duplicate what it took the Hubble Space Telescope to do, from their backyards.
- Ken Spencer, president of the Astronomical Society of Long Island
"With modern digital equipment, dedicated amateur astrophotographers can almost duplicate what it took the Hubble Space Telescope to do, from their backyards," said Ken Spencer, president of the Astronomical Society of Long Island. "That is just plain astounding. And Ken Scheben's work along with others in our club is proof of that."
Steve Mitchell, of West Islip, an architect by profession, but someone who always had an interest in space, began photographing landscapes at Robert Moses State Park and cityscapes in Manhattan. Now an astrophotographer like Scheben, Mitchell also creates images from the perspective of Long Island landscapes, like a stunning picture of a moonrise over the Robert Moses Bridge.
Mitchell said he's overjoyed to add the heavens to his list of subjects. "Just to be able to actually photograph the Milky Way," he said, "you really couldn't do that in the past. Now you can. It kind of boggles my mind."
The society formed 70 years ago as a small group of amateur astronomers, and today it has about 80 members. In the beginning, good telescopes were hard to buy, and serious stargazers often built their own, said Dave Bush, director of the Vanderbilt Museum's Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium in Centerport, where the club holds its monthly meetings.
"ASLI formed because there was a small, select group of people that were into this stuff," Bush said. These skilled hobbyists worked together and shared information about telescopes and astronomy.
Over time, Long Island's night skies became less revealing to stargazers: streetlights, parking lots, electronic ads, athletic fields, much of the infrastructure of modern suburban life has made Long Island a light-polluted area. (Spencer recalls being able to see clearly the distant constellation Hercules in the night sky, from his side yard in Sea Cliff, in the late 1980s. Now, he said, "It is never visible with the unaided eye because the light pollution completely obscures these fainter stars from being seen.")
Things changed when the Hubble Space Telescope, launched into orbit in 1990, began delivering its startling images of celestial objects. Interest in space photography grew. "People saw what was out there," said Bush. "As the technology progressed it became feasible for amateurs to do this well."
When Spencer, a former Newsday photographer, joined the society in 1989, he said about 30% to 40% of the membership were observers -- those interested in studying the skies through their telescopes. Now there are fewer pure observers, which he attributed to light-polluted skies.
"What's gradually happened is that we now have more people interested in this kind of astrophotography," he said.
Jessica Li was a sophomore at Syosset High School when her parents drove her to her first society meeting in 2008. Li was interested in learning how to build a telescope, but she recalled being impressed with the work produced by the club's photographers. "Their patience and their dedication is just really astounding to me," she said. "When I look at these images, it's really inspiring for the public and for scientists alike."
And Li can now be counted among the latter group: Fifteen years after she attended her first meeting of the society, she is an accomplished astrophysicist, with advanced degrees from Stony Brook University and the University of Arizona. She is now doing post-doctoral work at the University of Florida.
While members of the Astronomical Society of Long Island are proud to have a genuine space scientist among their alumni, the photographers are quick to stress that they themselves are amateurs -- even though, in the case of someone like Scheben, the words "serious" might be added to that description.
"Ken's a great photographer," Diana Scheben said, adding with a chuckle, "and he's a little obsessive about his hobby."
To edit images of deep space objects -- which bear Tolkien-esque names such as Eye of God, the Wizard Nebula and Thor's Helmet -- Scheben uses tools including an Intel i7 processor with 32 gigabytes or RAM, an SSD boot drive and an Nvidia 3060 Graphics card. It is edited with the astrophotography software PixInsight.
How does the process work? First, Scheben inputs into his system a location that he has selected to shoot. His telescope, set up on his deck, aligns automatically with Polaris, the North Star. From there, the equipment can find the proper coordinates. Looking through his iPad (there is no eyepiece on the scope), Scheben will decide what kind of adjustments he might make, including his filters for light pollution. He might even manually adjust the telescope if he wants to frame the image in a different way. Once he's satisfied, the camera mounted to his telescope will take a series of shots.
Typically, he said, each astral image takes five minutes to shoot, and he may shoot three dozen images over three hours. These time-lapse images are then "stacked" to produce one. "This is to account for the movement of the Earth," he explained. (Otherwise, stars tend to look blurry when photographed.)
He then enhances the image using a digital color filter -- aligned to the palette the Hubble uses with its images -- that assigns different colors to various gases that make up the stars and nebulae: Hydrogen is represented as green, oxygen as blue and sulfur as red. When viewing one of his pictures, the brightest areas in these colors indicate the highest concentrations of that particular gas.
As Scheben demonstrates the system on a multiscreen computer in his basement, vast spires of blue and expansive shrouds of orange appear on his screen. The colors render what looked at first like a humdrum view of the night sky with tiny pinpoints of light into vivid, colorful portraits of objects such as the Flaming Star Nebula in the far reaches of the galaxy.
But given the digital enhancements, are these really accurate depictions of what is out there? Or should astrophotography be considered a form of visual art?
"The amateurs' photos are accurate to a degree," Bush said. "However, they're edited in image editing software. So, there is an artistic license to it." Although, he added, "It's real stuff that is out there."
The realism-versus-enhancement question is an ongoing debate. "There are people in the club who frown on those that want to exaggerate what's there," said Steven Bandel, a member of ASLI's board of directors and an astrophotographer. "There are others who would say it's OK. I understand both, I appreciate both."
Regardless of the artistic license taken, good astrophotographers are highly skilled and often have a discerning eye for images -- not surprising, considering that many of them were accomplished photographers before they turned their cameras to the sky.
The thrill of the images produced by astrophotographers is not limited to laypeople.
"There are definitely images where I get a sense of wonder," said Ed Bloomer, a senior astronomer at the U.K.'s Royal Observatory Greenwich and one of the judges of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year award. By looking at the representations of space phenomenon that are in continual motion, "you're seeing a demonstration of process," he wrote in an email. "You're being shown the workings of the universe in a beautiful way."
And in a way that reminds us of not only the universe's transient and ever-changing nature, but also how inscrutable it has been to our senses -- until now. "We are blind to most of the universe," said Bush, referring to the limits of the human eye. "But now we have a way of seeing the objects in our galaxy."