Karl von Ahnen's Photo Gallery

It's been hard for our long-time LIA and DeAnza Planetarium Director Karl von Ahnen to migrate from film to digital. I hope this page will eventually fill with plenty of pictures, as Karl has a fine eye and good technique for teasing the best out of a shot.

 

Mars during the 2005 Opposition. This shot is a stack of 113 frames from an .avi file made on his Apple G3, recorded from his Philips ToUcam on an 8" f/10 Celestron on Nov 20. The seeing was quite poor and the ToUcam did not permit a good image scale. Nevertheless, the pics below are far better than any single frame. The shot here is a stack of the frames above 98% quality,

Mars. A stack of many more frames, above 70% quality, automatically selected and stacked in Registax 3. I outputed the result to a .tif file, then opened it in Photoshop 7 and cropped it, adjusted the levels, brightness, contrast, and then did a rather strong unsharp mask to sharpen it up. Watching the footage, I guessed that only a tiny fraction of the frames were usable, so I was suprised to find that when I set the quality filter as low as 70% and thus take a much larger number of frames, the image came out significantly sharper

 

His recent trip to a planetarium conference in Fairbanks, Alaska was a good opportunity to capture some aurorae here at solar minimum. His son Garth did some of these, on a Kodak consumer digital camera.