Galaxy quest

Mike Mayda is a forensic-imaging consultant by day, but at night he becomes an astrophotographer, using telescopes and cameras to capture colorful nebulae and swirling galaxies. While most images are within the Milky Way galaxy, Mayda has photographed the Andromeda galaxy from a Sacramento telescope, which is approximately 2.5 million light years away, and M100 while in New Mexico, a spiral galaxy approximately 56 million light years away. With an average exposure time of 12 hours, photographs can take months and sometimes years to capture, depending on weather conditions and light pollution. Mayda’s primary telescope is located east of Fresno, which he operates remotely from his Sacramento home. His images will be on display at Viewpoint Gallery (2015 J Street, Suite 101) through September.

Do you think there’s intelligent life in other parts of the universe?

Yeah. It’s just statistics. I can’t imagine that somewhere out there [in the] billions of galaxies and billions of stars in each galaxy, and I bet most of them have planets—there’s got to be something out there.

How about intelligent life in our galaxy?

Not locally. I wonder about our planet sometimes. Our galaxy? Probably. I forget the exact number, but there’s something around a billion stars within our galaxy. And there’s got to be one or more that the chemistry and everything else worked out similar to the way ours did. That’s one of the fascinating parts of astronomy as a hobby in general, is keeping up with what is being done to track down possible other sites of life in the universe. The optics, the chemistry, the theoretical work—it’s all mind-boggling but fascinating.

Have you been able to take photos from downtown Sacramento?

Oh yeah. I have a small observatory on a deck at the back of the house, and it’s strange because a big tree is nearby, but I’ll go out there a few times a year and I’ll shoot what we call white field objects. They’re still pretty telephoto in comparison to what we shoot on the ground of sports and things, but white field is pretty much like a 500mm focal-length lens. They’re shorter. You can do that from the city if you’re using what they call narrow band filters that allow in only a very narrow chunk of the color spectrum in at a time and throw everything else away.

What’s the process for capturing an image?

It goes on for a while. I’m working on a couple of images now that I started two and three years ago gathering the data—partly because of just being lazy and partly because the objects in the right part of the sky are only appearing for a month at a time each year. So you got to grab them while they’re available, and if the weather’s no good you have troubles.

So the process is essentially selecting an object, either from seeing a picture that someone else had done or stumbling across it online … figuring out the right time of year to image it when it’s high in the sky and the conditions are the best. And then planning the technical aspects of it, such as will it be a narrow-band-filter type of object, or will it be something where you use regular red, green and blue filters to get a normal, full-color type of image of it.

When we’re imaging, we’re taking one image at a time through one filter at a time, and typically the exposure times are maybe 15 minutes to a half an hour for each of these single images. But typically we take a dozen or two dozen of those images through each filter. So you can end up—if you’re doing a red, green and blue type of color image—you can end up with 36 or more images that you have to assemble. We take so many and we expose so long because you have to do that to get enough solid data that lets you throw away all the noise that always is in images. … Once you get the clean data, you stack these images together. For each color there’s a convoluted process there. Then you combine your red, your green and your blue images into a single frame. You overlap them and have to match them up perfectly so that every star aligns perfectly.

How many telescopes do you have?

I probably have six or seven. The primary one I use is in a remote observatory about 50 miles east of Fresno, up by Shaver Lake. It’s a 16-inch Ritchey-Chrétien telescope. It’s a reflector with very specialized optics in it that just takes beautiful, sharp images. But I have a 6-inch Takahashi refractor, which is what I use here in Sacramento most of the time. And I have a series of other smaller scopes. Some are used just for guiding the bigger scopes, some are just for being able to take out and either go to a star party or look at things fairly quickly.

Have you invested a lot in astrophotography?

Moneywise? Oh, gosh. I could buy a couple of new cars.