Rohit is a self-taught astrophotographer and amateur astronomer. He got interested in these as a past-time during the Covid lockdowns. Of Indian descent, he has travelled and lived widely, and first moved to Aotearoa about 30 years ago. He now lives in Auckland with his wife & son and is also a Buddhist teacher.
‘I have always loved gazing at the night sky - whether it is the ancient constellations, planets, nebulae bursting with stars being born, or the faint galaxies many light years away. These vistas of time and space are way beyond our human comprehension, yet seeing them touches something very deep in the imagination.
I enjoy the technical & artistic challenges of photographing something almost invisible to our human vision. The light I capture left its source thousands and even millions of years ago. My portfolio encompasses Deep Space, Planetary, Lunar & Nightscape astrophotography. I use telescopes, astro-cameras, normal DSLR cameras, wide-field lenses and specialist software tools to create these images. Many of them have been imaged from my Auckland backyard. Join me on this Journey to the Stars!’
More than meets the eye …
While many of us have been amazed in the recent years by the images from Hubble & JWST space telescopes, not many are aware how much can be captured with much humbler equipment even from a city. I have imaged Deep Space Objects (DSO) like galaxies & nebulae millions of light years away right from my backyard in suburban Auckland.
Many DSO are not visible at all to the naked eye or even with a visual telescope, but the modern camera sensors and astrograph lenses are capable to capturing very faint light using extremely long exposures and processing techniques. Each image can take many weeks or even months of work to produce, as I repeatedly photograph the same target at night whenever weather permits, using a tracking mount that follows the target at the correct speed i.e. matching the earth rotation. Each exposure is about 30 seconds to 2 minutes long. Once I have about 15-30 hours of quality exposures, the thousands are photos are ‘stacked’ using specialist software to combine all the information into a single image. It is then further ‘polished’ to bring out the faint colours and features using other software.
And finally, if all goes well, the image reveals itself on my computer screen after weeks of work! The light that has been travelling for millions of years through space and then landed on my camera’s sensor is now made visible to the human eye.
