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my space: richie JarviS’ obServatory
In the back garden of his house in South Chailey,
amateur astronomer Richie Jarvis has his own
observatory, where he takes photos of stars, planets
and galaxies.
It was my ex-wife’s fault I got into astronomy.
She was doing an Open University course in science,
part of it was in astronomy and I was interested from
a kid, but I’d never even looked through a telescope.
We went out and bought a telescope, one of the
cheap little two-inch ones from one of those nature
shops. Its tripod was so badly made I couldn’t steadily
see a planet, it would just wobble. But I looked at
Saturn, and that was it. ‘I’ve got to get a bigger one’.
As a divorce present, I bought an 8-inch telescope
that I had absolutely no idea how to use.
It would follow the sky, on an equatorial mount,
which tracks the direction of the earth’s rotation,
and counteracts for it, so as the earth rotates the
telescope stays still relative to the sky.
My current telescope is connected to the computer.
You fire up the Planetarium software, and just
say ‘point to that star’. It knows exactly where that
is, what time it is, and it knows the exact position of
that telescope right now. Knowing that, and some
compensation co-ordinates, I can tell it to look at
anything.
The moon is the biggest source of light pollution
in the night sky. You can’t do deep-sky photography
My wiLdLiFe sPaCe
when the moon is full, because you’d need to leave
the shutter open for 10-15 minutes, and the moon
will just wash the picture out.
When you see stars twinkling, that’s because
the atmosphere is moving around, and diffracting
all the light around, showing you rainbow colours.
That’s a real problem because it just blurs the image.
You’re looking for a night when the atmosphere is
very steady, and that’s when you take pictures of the
Moon, and Jupiter and Saturn.
When you’re using a camera, you’ll typically put
the SLR directly on the telescope, which acts
like a lens. My main imaging camera is monochrome,
and I use filters to build up a colour image.
Hydrogen is the most common element in the
universe, and it glows red, so pictures end up too red
otherwise.
We’re very, very, very tiny. To map out the solar
system with the Earth as a ping-pong ball, the sun
would have to be about 4.5m in diameter. At the
scale of a ping pong ball as the sun, it’s 129 metres
to Neptune! Jupiter is the size of a peppercorn, and
Saturn is about the size of a small ball bearing. You
cannot represent the rest of the planets in the Solar
System, at that scale, because they’re too small.
You’re not talking pinhead, you’re talking the sharp
end of the pin. As told to Steve Ramsey
You can see Richie’s photos on his website, nebul.ae
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Photo montage by Katie Moorman