RE: [APML] Ilford B&W film + H-Alpha filter

[mystars@ephemeris.com]

I haven't experimented as much as I'd like with different films, but here
is some infomration from another fairly detailed book.

In "A Manual of Advanced Celestial Photography," edited by Brad Wallis and
Robert Provin, Cambridge University Press, 1988 an entry by James Rouse
gives these recommendatations for planets:

Mercury: 2415 Tech Pan, Ektachrome 64
Venus:   2415 Tech Pan, Ektachrome 64
Mars:    2415 Tech Pan, Kodachrome 64 (must be for the warm Kodachrome reds)
Jupiter: 2415 Tech Pan, Ektachrome 200
Saturn:  2415 Tech Pan, Ektachrome 200
Uranus:  Tri-X, Ektachrome 400

Tech Pan was pretty sensitive to orange, so it appeared lighter.
Tri-X is still versatile but doesn't have that orange sensitivity of
Tech Pan.

For lunar (and solar, with a filter) astrophotography, he shows
examples of Tri-X developed with Kodak's D-19 developer (too contrasty)
and H&W Control Developer (nicer results that preserve a lot more
detail).  He shows photos with and without an H-alpha filter too,
to emphasize the contrast gain.

Note that this book from England doesn't mention Ilford films!  Has
anyone tried producing astrophotographs using some ordinary film plus
Ilford's Contrast Mask Film together?

I've wanted to experiment more with B&W developers in astrophotography
but haven't taken the time to do it.  There's one developer formula
given in an old copy of Aaron Sussman's "The Amateur Photographer's
Handbook" called Champlin 15, supposedly a fine grain, ultra-smooth
developer.  Anyone out there ever tried the stuff?  The book is
loaded with developer formulas, but doesn't discuss astrophotography
in any detail.

By the way if anyone's interested in software in C that uses the
JPL ephemeris files, I've put a free library downloadable online at

     http://www.ephemeris.com/software.html

but it is just a start.

It gives rectangular coordinates (just like JPL's FORTRAN code),
but I need to add enough for topocentric coordinates (make the
skeleton code I wrote for myself more industrial-strength).

Paul
_______________________________________________
Astro-Photo mailing list
Astro-Photo@seds.org
http://seds.org/mailman/listinfo/astro-photo