Capturing the Beauty of the Night Skies:
Jason Ware is a deep-sky guy
Cindy Boykin

Jason Ware was a kid when Sputnik orbited the earth. He and his mom sat out in their backyard on a clear Kansas night and waited to catch a glimpse of history in the making.

Of course, history is a relative term, considering the event occurred against a backdrop of stars estimated to be a billion years old.

A product of the space race and avid Star Trek fan, Jason has been fascinated with outer space for most of his life. Then in 1989, his wife gave him an amateur telescope for Christmas, which turned out to be one giant leap towards a new passion.

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Like anyone who gets a “department store” telescope, Jason took his out of the box and looked at the moon, which appeared to have blue edges around it, and distant stars the size of dots that looked like bigger dots. At this point, many people nod their head and say, Well, that was interesting, and put the telescope in a closet.

But the new worlds revealed to him through this little telescope intrigued him enough to begin reading books about astronomy and subscribe to Sky & Telescope magazine. When he noticed that some of the photos in the magazine were taken with a telescope a little bigger than his, he decided he would take the next step.

Jason invested in an 8-inch telescope (8 inches in diameter) made by Meade Instruments, and he also purchased the required attachment enabling him to take pictures with a camera—first film then digital CCD. Soon, he not only captured great images, he also caught the eye of industry professionals.

“I got a few pictures published in Sky & Telescope, and Meade took notice,” Jason explains. “They contacted me and said, ‘Hey, we like what you’re doing, and we’ve got some new telescopes coming out. Would you like to try one out?’ One thing led to another and I’ve been working with them since 1991.

“Now, I’m kind of a beta tester/consultant. They’ll send me an early beta unit and I’ll play with it and give them feedback—tell them what works and what doesn’t.”

Today, Jason has a 12-inch telescope that he rolls out to the backyard to take pictures of deep space. A Meade Instruments 20-inch telescope stored in the garage requires a portable crane to move into position. With powerful telescopes such as these, Jason gets stunning pictures of galaxies and nebula millions of light years away.

Surprisingly, the light pollution of the city does not pose a problem. Jason explains, “You need a dark sky for photographing galaxies because it’s a broad spectrum. But for the nebula, it turns out that they emit light in a very narrow spectrum—like a florescent light.

“When we see sunlight or moonlight or regular light, it’s all the colors of the rainbow. But nebula emit color in one very narrow spike. So we use filters, the same filters on the Hubble Space Telescope, and they basically only get that little sliver of light and block out all the other colors, so it blocks out all the city lights.”

As the world turns
The two biggest challenges with deep sky photography are light and time.

Light is not only what you see around you, but heat from the camera itself causes “noise” which makes a photo look foggy. In a normal camera, you’re taking a thousandth of a second exposure, so heat is not a factor. But when you do long exposures—three to four hours is typical—thermal noise builds up. Jason’s equipment has a detector that keeps the chip in his digital camera cooled down to -40˚ Centigrade.

The other big challenge is time. He says, “When we’re taking these exposures, which can be three or four hours long, the earth is turning.” Fortunately, telescope drive systems available today compensate for the earth’s movement and make adjustments automatically. Not like the old days, in the ’90s, when photographers fixed cross hairs on a guide star and had to keep the focus centered on that star.

“We watched the cross hairs and sat there with a little controller…and tried to stay awake! Your eyes would get fuzzy staring at the little cross hairs for hours and hours,” he recalls.

The discussion continues about gases and new star formation and frequencies and the effects of heat and noise…all of it light years above a layman’s head.

Jason gets the picture.

“You know,” he says reassuringly, “astronomy has appeal for the beginner to the advanced. Don’t expect to go out tomorrow and take pictures like this. This is years of experience and work. But you can start out with a camera on a tripod doing star trails.

“On the observing side of it, you can start out looking at the moon and planets. You can use binoculars and look at star clusters and galaxies.

“The main thing, I would say, is to look for interesting books to read. Read the history of early astronomers who tried to figure out their place in the universe. Go out and look at the sky and think about what they might have wondered thousands of years ago when they named the constellations and thought they were gods.”

What about taking astronomy classes at a college? “Well,” Jason reasons, “if you take it in college, you may rarely look through a telescope. You’ll be doing a bunch of physics and math, calculating light speed and all that, and you’ll think Wow, this stuff is hard. And it is.

“I would recommend visiting an astronomy club. Local clubs, like the Texas Astronomical Society (TAS) of Dallas, have star parties and new-member programs. We’ve got over 500 people in the (TAS) astronomy club. Some of the members only do observing. There are little observing programs you can go through and find objects and get a certificate. I did all that years ago. Other members mostly do photography. I lean more towards the photography part now.”

 Jason’s photography is compelling —and marketable, as it turns out. Not only does he sell photographs through his website galaxyphoto.com, but Meade uses his work in product catalogs and even on department store telescope packaging.

Smiling, Jason shares, “It’s kind of neat to walk into a Walmart and see a picture that I took on the telescope box!”

Small world.