What is Astrophotography?
"ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY": The art of photographing or imaging objects in deep space. This is a very unique form of photographic art. It requires an extreme amount of patience, time, and lots of practice to master.

With what and how are they taken?
With his very large first homemade 16" diameter F4.5 Newtonian Telescope, as well as many other smaller instruments. (see "Equipment") All of John's photographs are time exposures ranging from 10 min. to 9 hours for each image. This type of photography requires him to track on a star at high power during the entire exposure time in order to get pinpoint star images. It is extremely demanding, but well worth the resulting images. With 3,500+ images already recorded on film, and over 35,000 with John's CCD archive, he continues to photograph the endless list of events and objects out there. The formats are 35mm, 6x4.5, 6x6, & 4x5 medium format taken on fine grain 25-400 ISO films and developed and printed up to 20"x 24" in his own darkroom.

How are they printed?
All are printed directly from the original 35mm, 6cmx4.5cm, 6cmx6cm, or 4x5 negative. Some images are taken with either Astronomical cooled CCD(Charged Coupled Device) or my new High Resolution Digital camera and printed on traditional chemical based Photographic paper.

Awards & Publications

John has won over 70 awards, including 5 gold medals for his excellence in Astrophotography!

John work has graced the Front Cover of "TIme" Magazine, National Geographic, Discover, Science, and Astronomy Magazine.  He has over 750 images published in dozens of Books and educational electronic media.  His archive contains in excess of 35,000 images  the largest of its kind in the world.

 John Chumack owns and operates 5 homemade observatories....which are Official Research Facilities.

John's Observatories are on the Worlds list of Major Observatories.

Known as The Chumack Observatories,

MPC 838 Dayton Research Stations

MPC H66 Yellow Springs Research Stations

He has done commision work for NASA, The National Science Foundation, AAVSO,  and many other educational organizations.

He has appeared on many Local and National Newspapers & TV interviews about his work and Observatories.

Visit his website at http://www.galacticimages.com/