Dennis
Kortyka |
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Dennis Kortyka of North Kingsville, Ohio is a self-taught amateur astronomer. He became interested in astronomy at an early age, but really became a serious student when Halley's Comet arrived in 1985. |
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He bought a a 35mm manual camera with a 50mm lens, a tripod and a cable release. With this equipment he tried to photograph Halley's Comet without much success. Undaunted, he continued to experiment with photographing the night sky, getting a little better with each roll. Joining the Astronomy Book Club and subscribing to Sky and Telescope and Astronomy Magazine also helped. |
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Dennis purchased a 76mm jason reflecting telescope and began looking at the moon and planets. This inspired him to save for two years to purchase a Meade 8" Schmidt Cassegroen telescope. To this was added a motor to track the movement of the sky. The first sight through this was M-13 (a globular star cluster). It wasn't long before he was purchasing fittings to attach his camera to this scope. |
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| The moon was his first subject and the photos were good enough to sustain his interest. Taking this large telescope out of his house and setting up in the backyard was getting tiresome. With the blessing of his wife Donna, he built a roll-off roof observatory on his property; known affectionately as the "Star Chamber". In addition, he planted a row of trees in order to block light noise from the neighborhood. With the telescope safely installed and polar aligned, it only took 4 minutes to open the roof, remove the covers on the scope and he could begin looking at the sky. This was a far cry from the 30 minutes it used to take. Many times clouds would obscure the sky before it was ready! | |
