Public Star Night – September 20, 2024 – Astrophotography

RDee Sherrill, PhD is a past LTO volunteer and board member who possesses a great love of astronomy. That love has taken him deep into the world of astrophotography. RDee will share and discuss his retirement hobby and show us a selection of his photographs of nebula, stars and galaxies, and colliding galaxies. He will also talk about hardware and instrumentation, the basic approach to collecting and processing data, and as well as displaying raw data and how a picture can be “teased” from the background noise. He promises that the discussion of astrophotography will be non-technical and focus mainly on the “pretty pictures” with some semi-technical discussion of the astronomical objects themselves.

After receiving his PhD degree in nuclear chemistry, Dr Sherrill worked at the DOE Rocky Flats Plant, the NASA Johnson Space Center, the DOE Brookhaven National Laboratory, and several private companies. RDee and his wife Beth moved full time to Estes Park in 2011 and he retired in 2013. After retirement RDee decided to further pursue his life-long interest in astronomy by building an observatory and delving into astrophotography of deep space objects.