Shallow Sky: Imaging our Solar System with the Masters

Today’s top amateur astronomers garner images of our solar system in breathtaking, unprecedented detail. These talented few—including an artist, a businessman, an engineer, a lawyer, a mechanic, a physician and three IT professionals—now produce images far surpassing the best that the great professional observatories produced only twenty-five years ago. Their amazing images are sought after by professional astronomers for scientific research, and constitute an art form for all who appreciate celestial wonders.


Shallow Sky profiles the leading amateur planetary imagers of today and the last half-century. Each chapter of the book is devoted to a single imager, and seeks to describe the passions that drive them to tirelessly create high-resolution images night after night. Here you’ll meet elite imagers like the late, great Don Parker, M.D., who spent decades imaging through the night to his beloved jazz; Damian Peach, who travels from frozen mountain tops to tropical islands in pursuit of planetary images; and Thierry Legault, who uses split-second timing to capture spacecraft silhouetted against the Sun. Here you’ll also find the story of how the rise of CCD sensors and webcams helped these amateurs to make a leap forward in image resolution, and of how the internet ties together amateur astronomers throughout the world. Come and see our solar system through the eyes and cameras of amateur astronomy’s very best.