Tremonton » Watching Tyler Allred work on one of his pictures of a deep-space nebula is a lot like watching a magic trick.
The amateur astronomer starts by pulling up a black and white image of what looks like just a star field. But after a few mouse clicks, the stellar clouds that set the dramatic backdrop of the Horsehead and Flame nebulae start emerging.
Allred pulls up images of the same star field shot through red, green and blue filters, layers them, and suddenly, the bright reds, purples and blues usually seen only through space-based telescopes such as the Hubble become clear.
"The photographs show so much more detail than you can get from looking through the eyepiece of your telescope," Allred said. "There's something about that deep, long exposure that lets you get color you couldn't ever see."
The 45-year-old amateur astronomer has invested more than $20,000 into his set up with multiple cameras and telescopes, and spends countless hours at his computer. He takes dozens of 20-minute exposures, layers them and pulls out the details. But he never adds anything that isn't originally there.
"I'm not painting or faking anything," he said.
He uses his layering techniques because the difference in light between empty space and a stellar cloud is tiny. But spending a night every two weeks in the winter and two or three nights a week in the summer capturing images is something Allred cherishes.
"I just love being out at night," he said, "and there's something relaxing and fascinating about looking at objects in space."
His father, Glenn, first introduced him to astronomy as a young child. Glenn Allred worked as a painter at the Utah State University Space Dynamics Lab, creating conceptual paintings of rockets, payloads and eventually the International Space Station over a 31-year career. He built a telescope out of an old aerial camera back in the 1970s, and eventually was able to arrange to have a 12-inch Newtonian telescope from USU put in his backyard observatory at his home in Richmond, Utah.
"It was a tough instrument. It was a two-person job," Glenn Allred said. "Finally, my wife said 'Why don't you get your own telescope?' "
It was then, a couple years later, that he purchased a 14-inch Celestron and added it to his backyard observatory. USU students, Boy Scouts and other community members would visit their observatory to escape the light pollution in Logan.
"All this, I'm sure, is what got Tyler going on it," he said, adding that his son now has gotten him involved in astrophotography as well.
Tyler Allred took an astronomy class in college and documented the moon each night through its month-long phases. He was hooked after that.
But after he moved out of his parents' home, he had to put astronomy on hold as he created a family and pursued a master's degree in river geomorphology. It was only after he began working as a river consultant, helping restore watercourses to their natural channels, that he saved up enough to invest in his own equipment.
He started out with smaller, cheaper telescopes and cameras, taking images of Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and the moon.
"The leap from taking pictures of those to deep-sky objects is a quantum leap in cost," he said.
He invested in a better, $9,000 Astro Systeme Austria 8-inch telescope and a $2,400 mount that moves smoothly enough to hold the image perfectly still. He also bought a few cameras, ranging from $2,400 to $5,000, that super-cool the microchip that acts as film for a digital camera to remove the random, minute specks seen in the background of all digital images.
He posts all of his images for free viewing at www.allred-astro.com, and will attempt selling his photos for the first time this summer at the Bryce Canyon Astronomy Festival.
While he's sunk thousands into equipment for his hobby, he's been able to make images that professional astronomers once had to spend millions to create, said Patrick Wiggins, NASA solar system ambassador to Utah.
"He's done a service to the local astronomy community," Wiggins said. "He's inspired many of us, and dared us to do better. He was inspired by others' work, and I'm interested down the road at what people looking at his work will end up doing.
