‘For astrophotography Les Granges is the place to be’ Award winning astrophotographer Frans Kroon

Les Granges proprietor Olly Penrice is a well known astrophotographer whose picures have been published in Astronomie, Astronomy Now, Sky at Night, Starlight, the SPA journal, the Guardian Online and elsewhere. He has had many forum Pictures of the Week as well as Amateur Astronomy Picture of the Day. He is a frequent contributor to Astronomy Now, mainly reviewing astro-imaging equipment and telescopes. Many Les Granges guests have also had images selected for awards and publication, including Maurice Toet’s contribution to a NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Olly will help you both at the image capture and image processing stages if you wish. It is often possible for complete beginners to produce images of publication quality by the end of a week.

All of this is now more comfortable in our new multi-screen IT and processing room.

This instruction is still free to guests of Les Granges. Some of the more advanced procedures you can learn include layer masking different exposure times for high dynamic range, enhancing colour images with narrowband layers, adding high resolution images to widefield ones from different instruments and creating seamless mosaics.

You can try both one shot colour and monochrome cameras as reviewed in Astronmy Now magazine, for whom Olly wrote a ‘shoot-out’ comparison.

Before investing in CCD imaging gear a trip to Les Granges could save you a great deal of heartache – and cash! There is a lot to learn but help at the beginning will allow you to move quickly into successful astro-imaging.

For those bringing their own equipment we have four prepared observing sites ready and waiting. Many of our guests do this on a regular basis.

Thanks to Ian King Imaging (www.iankingimaging.com) for supplying the equipment and for providing technical support.

Olly’s own astro images appear on Smugmug