Simon Addis (UK)

Simon Addis is an amateur astrophotographer based in London, UK. He bought his first telescope in 2013 and progressed into astrophotography quickly from there. Simon has had several images published (e.g. NASA APOD, EAPOD) and sold for corporate marketing as well as appearing in Astronomy Now Magazine and various astronomy websites. He was shortlisted in the 2016 Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, London. Simon is interested in technology in general and works as a technical sales engineer for a software and communications company.

Oleg Bryzgalov (UA)

Oleg Bryzgalov was born in Ukraine and now lives in the city of Kiev. His occupation is a construction engineer, but he has been working in computer technology for 28 years. Since Oleg was always very interested in natural sciences, his children and friends surprised him in 2009, on his 50th birthday, with a 10 inch reflector telescope. This was Oleg's start of his passion for astronomy. After several months of visual observing Oleg started with his first steps in astrophotography using a SLR camera. In 2013 Oleg designed and assembled an "astrograph of his dreams", while keeping in mind the reasonable size and budget. Using this setup Oleg could improve his image acquisition and image processing skills to a top level. as you can see on his website.

Bart Delsaert (BE)

Bart Delsaert is an amateur astronomer from Overijse, a small town near Brussels, Belgium. He has been interested in astronomy since he was 12 years old, but it was not until 2008 that Bart began to explore various areas of astrophotography. Escaping the light-polluted Belgian skies, he now images from his remote controlled observatory located in the French southern Alps. His images have been published in multiple books, magazines and websites. Bart is an active member of American, Belgian, Dutch, French and Chinese astronomy fora. For imaging he's mainly using a fast corrected Newtonian but occasional excursions with a small portable gear is also part of his passion.

Josep Drudis (ES)

Josep Drudis, 66 years old, MSc and PhD in Chemistry at the U. Autonoma de Barcelona, as well as MSc in Astronomy at Swinburne Technology University (Melbourne, Australia). Professionally, worked as R&D manager in a German company and during the latest 25 years as CEO in different companies as well as a big hospital. Retired some years ago, in order to devote all free time to astrophotography (his hobby since he was 18). Member of the Agrupacion Astronomica de Sabadell (1000 members) and founder of its currently very active astrophotography group. Awarded five APODs in the last one and a half years and nine AAPODs.

Carlos Fairbairn (BR)

Carlos 'Kiko' Fairbairn is an astrophotographer with a passion for capturing the wonders of the night skies and also for spreading the word of astronomy. His major goal is making astronomy more popular by using the photographs to kindle the flame of interest in the general public. Working towards his goals made Carlos an invited speaker in events such as TED Talks, Campus Party, TV shows, You Tube live talks and several astronomy-related events. In 2016 Carlos had the honor to be nominated as winner on the prestigious contest 'Astronomy Photographer of the Year', in Sir Patrick Moore's category.

Luigi Fontana (IT)

Luigi Fontana is an amateur astronomer from Milano, Italy. Born in 1968, he has more than 35 years experience in astrophotography. Since 1986, he publishes in Italian magazines on a regular basis, and he is part of the regular speakers team of Milano's Planetarium. He published two books about astronomy and worked part time for different companies related to astronomy. Luigi will give a lecture together with his friend Edoardo Radice, which he got to know during his physics studies at the Milano University around 1990.

Bogdan Jarzyna (PL)

Bogdan Jarzyna is a Polish astrophotographer, who lives in the city of Cracow. Over the last 15 years, Bogdan has gained a lot of experience in astrophotography by using optics of various focal lengths and apertures and by making astro travels to distant places like Namibia. Currently his preferred setup consists of a TEC140 refractor and a QHY695A camera on a Paramount MyT mount. According to Bogdan, modern astrophotography equipment is a kind of time machine that brings us closer to the distant objects of the deep cosmos. Astrophotography is an inspiration for body and mind, for which it is worth the many efforts! His passion is creating deep colour images of galaxies, nebulae and star clusters, as shown in his wonderful gallery.

Stefan Jordan (DE)

Apl. Prof. Dr. Stefan Jordan worked at the universities of Kiel, Baton Rouge, Göttingen, and Tübingen before he started 2004 his involvement in the Gaia project in 2004 at the Astronomisches Recheninstitut of the university of Heidelberg. Amongst others he worked on the daily quality control of the Gaia data, their visualization, their publication with the help of databases and for public outreach. Furthermore, his research areas include stellar atmospheres and the late phases of stellar evolution.

Nicolas Kizilian (FR)

Nicolas Kizilian is a French astrophotographer interested in astronomy from a young age. At the age of 14, he started doing astro imaging on film with a 200mm SCT which he still uses 25 years later. Over the past few years he has specialized in narrowband CCD astrophotography using a wide range of instruments from 66mm refractors in his backyard to 600mm professional grade observatories. His latest images have been published in multiple magazines and websites, and noticed as they were produced from limited resources.

Erich Meyer (AT)

Erich Meyer has been working in the field of astronomy since 1971. His main interests are celestial mechanics, astrometry, history of astronomy, astrophotography and astronomy workshops for children. Remarkable is his work in astrometry, where he made important measurements to determine the exact orbit of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 before its collision with Jupiter. He is the discoverer or co-discoverer of 27 minor planets. His latest astrophotography projects focus on capturing mosaics of the entire sky (360 x 180degree) and producing deep all sky images including accurate zodiacal light detection.

Fabian Neyer (CH)

Fabian works on different scientific projects about 3D/4D reconstruction of objects using optical images (photogrammetry). His passion for astrophotography started in the year 2000, during high-school, using the first generation of DSLR cameras. Most of his images are taken from the eastern part of Switzerland where he has access to the instrumentation of a local astronomical society. He is mainly imaging with refractor telescopes, though he also has experience with Newtonian and wide angle lens optics. Regarding astrophotography, he focuses on obtaining very deep images from all sorts of objects.

Martin Pugh (AU)

Martin Pugh's interest in astronomy coincided with the overwhelming appearance of Comet Hale Bopp in 1997. However, he did not purchase his first telescope and specialist camera until 1999. Inspired by the handful of amateur astrophotographers around at the time, learning and practicing this art form continued over the next few years until the next major equipment upgrade occurred in 2004; just prior to emigrating to Australia.
Then, under dark skies and with his own roll-off roof observatory at his rural property in Yass, astrophotography began in earnest. Martin was able to put all of the theory into practice and secured his first NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on 1 Jun 2006. Since then, Martin has secured 49 APODs (3 collaboratively and 4 using Hubble Legacy Archive data).
After 39 years of Naval Service, Martin has now retired and established his own remote imaging, data subscription and telescope hosting business from his home in Yass.

Edoardo Luca Radice (IT)

Edoardo Luca Radice is an amateur astronomer from Castenedolo, a little town near Brescia, Italy. Born on July 20th 1969 (15 minutes before the first Moon landing), he is an astronomy enthusiast since he was a child. He holds a degree in Physics from the Milano University. Edoardo began photographing the sky when he was 13. He "rediscovered" astrophotography in 2008 with a digital DSLR. Edoardo is one of the most skilled Italian amateurs in PixInsight and holds lessons and workshops in Italy. His website is www.arciereceleste.it (mostly in Italian) and he is the Admin of the PixInsight Italia Facebook Group (with more then 800 members).

Rafale Schmall (HU)

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Sebastian Voltmer (DE)

Sebastian Voltmer is a filmmaker and an internationally acclaimed astrophotographer. In 2000, he became a Federal prize winner in the youth STEM contest 'Jugend forscht'. From 2002 to 2003 his film 'The Face of the Sky' was shown in the 'Space Night' by the Bavarian television. Sebastian studied in Vienna, London and at the University of Kassel in the departments of photography as well as filmmaking and graduated in 2009 with his awarded film 'The Return of Mars' which was shown in cinemas and planetariums in the International Year of Astronomy. '50 Years of Human Spaceflight' is one of the features he realized with Apollo moonwalkers at the first STARMUS Festival 2011. Sebastian was the main winner of the category 'Power of Nature' by the 'Windland Smith Rice International Awards' in 2014 and became an 'Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year' in 2015 by the Royal Museums Greenwich. He got several APODs and works for inclusive astronomy outreach projects also for blind people to bring the universe closer to all of us.

Beat the bad weather and sleep well - Steps to build your own fully automated low cost backyard observatory.

Love astrophotography but had enough of the constant bad weather? Need to get some sleep but worried about leaving your kit out in the rain? This lecture, aimed at the technically minded, will take you on a step by step journey into building your very own back yard box observatory for under € 300. Using everyday off the shelf components and the latest in wireless microcontroller technology, this DIY project describes how to build a fully automated, weather aware, roll off roof observatory with full smartphone remote control.

Speaker: Simon Addis

Image acquisition and processing using low budget setups

Do you always need large and very expensive setups to create high-quality astrophotos? The answer is No, as Oleg Bryzgalov will show in his lecture. The process of obtaining high-quality and aesthetic astrophotos consists of a number of successive interrelated operations. Oleg will show that uncompromising attention to all the details of this process, understanding of their essence and influence on the final result are the key factors for a successful astrophoto.

Speaker: Oleg  Bryzgalov

Noise reduction techniques in Pixinsight

What is the best approach in Pixinsight to reduce the noise in your images? This lecture will provide an overview of the different solutions of noise reduction processing techniques, both in your linear and nonlinear image. It will cover the pitfalls and strategies to get to a natural-looking astrophoto.

Speaker: Bart Delsaert

High Resolution Wide Field images

The high quality of the current wide field telescopes allows for nice, crisp, pictures. If you still want to get better defined, crisper, higher resolution wide-field images, blending them with images taken with much larger telescopes can help to get better results. Here is a step-by-step tutorial to how to produce such crisper images, some of which have been selected as APOD.

Speaker: Josep Drudis

Astrophotography possibilities behind a portable equipment

This presentation will demonstrate the possibilities behind a portable setup. From landscape imagery and wide fields to exoplanet transit photometry. The usage of photographic equipments (DSLR + lenses) can generate a broad astrophotography experience.

Speaker: Carlos Fairbairn

PixelMath, the PixInsight's toolbox

In the whole range of tools provided by PixInsight, PixelMath is one of the most intimidating processes. It is however easy to learn the basics and can give from beginner to expert countless solutions and innovative perspectives throughout the processing of deep sky images.

Speaker: Nicolas Kizilian

High Resolution Astrophotography

Martin Pugh will discuss the pre-requisites of system build and software integration necessary to produce a high quality, high resolution astrophotograph. He will also briefly touch on the benefits of remote imaging. This lecture will also build the base for Martin's workshop on Sunday.

Speaker: Martin Pugh

Two tubes are better than one. Some new ideas about blending color and narrowband data, using PixInsight

The idea to blend color and narrowband data is surely not new, but PixInsight allows the astrophotographer to do it in news ways. Using - for example - a much smaller tube for the color data; a good way to "revive" that little refractor you have in your equipment! You can collect two data "flows" at the same time; or work with a friend, at the same time or not. Or use two cameras on the same scope. The lecture will cover some aspects of these techniques, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view.

Speaker: Edoardo Luca Radice,  Luigi Fontana

Creating a detailed Mars Map

With video data of the Mars opposition 2018, captured from the IAS-Observatory in Namibia, Sebastian Voltmer shows his recording- and processing methods to create a detailed map of the dusty Red Planet. The goal is a full Mars spin animation with the albedo structures during the perihelion opposition. Changes caused by the global dust storm will become visible.

Speaker: Sebastian Voltmer

Gaia’s second star catalogue - A huge step for astrophysics

Since 2014, ESA's astrometry satellite Gaia measures the stars of the Milky Way stars more accurately than ever before in order to obtain a better understanding of the structure and evolution of our home galaxy. On April 25, 2018, Gaia’s second star catalogue (Gaia DR2) was published: From more than 1.3 billion stars, the positions, motions, parallaxes (distances), and colors of stars were determined with high precision. These data are a source of new knowledge in practically all fields of astrophysics and new scientific publications based on the Gaia data appear almost daily. The talk will describe the Gaia mission and its main results.

Speaker: Stefan Jordan

NN

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Speaker: NN

Hubble Palette versus Bicolor

The starting point of this workshop are collected raw data of one single object in Ha, [OIII] and [SII]. Bogdan will demonstrate his complete workflow for creating a Hubble palette image and a bicolor image step by step. He will make a comparison between these two different image processing techniques. The workflow is based on Maxim DL, Photoshop and PixInsight.

Speaker: Bogdan Jarzyna

Exploring the Limits - Digging Out Faint Structures in Astrophotographs

Astrophotography is all about gathering light of faint celestial objects and displaying them in aesthetic pictures. Faint nebulas are often hidden or overshined by stars and thus are tricky to process. For narrowband images, different methods and even specialized software tools exist to remove stars so that the images can be enhanced without their influence. While this process is relatively easy for narrowband filtered images, the conventional methods are not satisfactory for broadband filtered pictures: Bright stars and clusters of stars can completely preclude a clear view of nearby faint nebulas. This workshop shows a method to overcome this limitation. It will go through the different steps of creating a clean starless image for broadband filtered data, explains how to use it in the processing pipeline, and it will also discuss the limits and pitfalls of the methodology. We will use PixInsight during the workshop.

Speaker: Fabian Neyer

High Resolution Astrophotography in Practice

Based on his lecture on Saturday, where Martin Pugh discussed the pre-requisites necessary to produce a high resolution astrophotography both from a hardware (system build) and software perspective, Martin's workshop will step through the 'Battle Rhythm' of image calibration, registration and data preparation. The lecturer will explore some key techniques that he uses in post processing to produce the best result possible from the data that has been acquired from a fully optimized imaging platform.

Speaker: Martin Pugh

Creating stunning sky panoramas

Erich Meyer will give a deep insight into the most important steps in creating an impressive sky panorama, including topics such as planning, overlapping, proper choice of projection type and colour neutrality. A very important step is the critical review of the final panorama by comparing the result with professional images from satellites like GAIA, Planck-HFI-LFI from ESA or IRAS/COBE. This critical review opens up the possibility of discovering new phenomena such as the entire Zodiacallight Dust Band.

Speaker: Erich Meyer

TWAN Workshop

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Speaker: Rafael Schmall