Meet the Stars from Newtown

Not Hollywood stars. Galaxies, nebulae and other wonders of the night sky, photographed from a backyard observatory right here in Newtown.

Conrad Neufeld shares his astrophotographs and explains how he captures distant objects using an observatory he built himself and a sixteen inch Newtonian telescope. A good part of the talk is the difficulty: how you photograph something that faint under Newtown's light-polluted skies at all. He also sets some of his own images beside photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope, which is a braver comparison than it sounds.

Neufeld brings more than forty-five years in systems engineering and electro-optics to it, designing, building and testing optical instruments for ground and space applications at PerkinElmer, Hughes and Raytheon. That career has taken him to aerospace facilities across the United States and Europe, a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, observatories high in the Andes, and the summit of Haleakala in Hawaii.

Good to know. Free, in the Meeting Room. Worth it for any skygazer.