About the Astrophotography Division
Deep-sky imaging from Denver and the dark skies of South Park, Colorado.
Michael's journey into astrophotography began in 2023 with a single Vespera Classic smart telescope. Today he images with a four-telescope array — two Vespera II and two Vespera Pro units — that travels with him between Denver and the dark skies of South Park, Colorado.
Since the spring of 2026, Michael has been developing the Astrophotography Automation System (APAS). Running on a dedicated Mac cluster, APAS automates the full pipeline from raw capture to a finished image:
- Downloading raw data from the telescopes
- Organizing observational files and folders so that multiple observations of a single deep-sky object can be combined
- Stacking and rejection
- Gradient removal
- Image scoring
- Basic stretching
A single successful night of imaging with all four scopes can easily yield more than 80 GB of data, so the Mac cluster stays busy — both computationally and in the constant work of organizing the files.
APAS now comprises roughly 93,000 lines of code, most of it written in Unix zsh, with additional components in Bash and Python. For final finishing it orchestrates Siril, GraXpert, RC-Astro tools, and Cosmos Darkroom, adding Gigapixel when preparing large prints.