Fantastic astrophotograpy book now out

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I have a couple of friends from another forum who have just published a stunning book of astrophotography: "Star Vistas". Greg Parker lives in England and he captures the images, and he emails them to Noel Carboni in Florida, who does the image-processing. The book was published by Springer, and is available through Amazon, but if you order it through the astronomy forum "Our Dark Skies" it is heavily discounted, and it ships for free. I'm posting this (with Greg's kind permission) so that PF members are aware of this great book.

The book is available with the discount and free shipping here:

http://www.ourdarkskies.com/webstore.php

These guys are no mere image-hackers. You'd think that they were stealing time on Keck or the HST, at times, though their images are generally wide-fields. Their images were all made with equipment available to amateurs (including a small APO refractor) which makes them all the more impressive.

There are three forwards in the book, written by Sir Arthur C. Clark (before his death, obviously), Sir Patrick Moore, and Dr. Brian May. When Greg and Noel presented Sir Patrick Moore with his copy, he exclaimed that it was the best volume of astrophotography he had ever seen. No faint praise, coming from the dean of amateur astronomy.

If you are an amateur astronomer, you will be floored by the images in this book - they are that good. Even if you are not an astronomer, you will find this to be a fantastic coffee-table book that you will browse again and again. Enjoy!

 

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For those who might want a preview of the types of images you will see in the book, here is a link to Greg's web site. There are links to Greg and Noel's images, and as you back up through the time-line you can see many of the images that are in the book. Just click on "Previous Entries" at the bottom left of each page and if an entry references an image with no thumbnail, click on "Read the rest of this entry" to get a link to the image.

http://www.newforestobservatory.com/