RED Astronomical Photography

"Mosqvich" (mosqvich) 08/16/2013 at 23:43 • Filed to: Off-Topic, Photography, Space, ISS, RED

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The story of how !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! came to be is known by a lot of people in the TV and Movie business, but not so much outside of Hollywood. There's this guy, Jim Jannard, who founded a little company you might've heard of called Oakley. With a few hundred dollars he turned Oakley into a firm he sold off for around $3 Billion. Three Billion Dollars. That's a lot of coin. Well, it turns out Jim is really more interested in cameras than sunglasses and cool accessories. He couldn't understand why there weren't any really good digital cinema cameras, so he took his own money and started RED.

Jim gets around on a really nice Bombardier. And a wicked armored truck. I've seen them.

So, one day I wondered if a RED Epic, RED's premier digital cinema camera, would work on a telescope. I picked up the phone and called RED. Eventually I met up with Jim over a 2 day conference and persuaded him to give me a few RED Epics to play with. He went one better and had a custom-made, one-of-a-kind RED Epic INFRA for my test. That's the top photo. I took the INFRA and put it on a 20" telescope at the United States Air Force Academy and we shot some pretty interesting imagery of the International Space Station. Now, you've got to understand that most imagery you get with telescopes of low flying satellites are rarely any better than a speck or blob. We gave it a whirl.

Here are the results, it may not blow you away, but they're actually really good. We shot them at 4k resolution in full motion, but then took individual frames, much like a lot fashion photographers do with RED Epics.

You must understand the ISS is moving at 17k MPH and the telescope is moving along with, things are jiggling, etc... There are other examples of excellent photos of the ISS, but often they look something like this.

And virtually none of them are done in full motion video.

f86sabre > Mosqvich 08/17/2013 at 09:09

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That is pretty remarkable. Very cool use of the technology.

dsigned001 - O.R.C. hunter > Mosqvich 08/17/2013 at 10:12

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It's crazy to think that we have something orbiting so far away that a ridiculously powerful telescope can only just resolve it.

lingmeister > Mosqvich 08/20/2013 at 17:34

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that scope is not worthy for any long exposure photography. And shouldn't use any camera that has the potential for jelloing when the equatorial mount is as shaky as that.