Stars in the Field of Astrophotography
Tony Hallas didn’t know the difference between a globular cluster and the planet Saturn when he first looked through a telescope.
Twelve years later, the 52-year-old Oak View resident has retired from the Ventura photo lab he founded so he can become one of a handful of professional astrophotographers in the world.
Astrophotographers are dedicated--some would say masochistic--folks who spend long nights braving freezing temperatures just to capture the faint glow of distant galaxies on film.
The payoff: breathtaking images that are literally out of this world, giving shape and form to otherwise nondescript dots of light, not to mention a perspective on our place in the universe.
“People are becoming aware Earth is just a speck in the universe,” Hallas said. “The blue sky is a lie.”
Largely unknown to the general public, Hallas is considered among the preeminent practitioners of his art.
“He has become in the last decade or so probably the premier color astrophotographer in the world,” said Dave Eicher, managing editor of Astronomy magazine, the largest-circulation English-language periodical in the field.
Images captured by Hallas and his wife, Daphne--who work so closely that they long ago decided to share photo credit a la Lennon and McCartney--have shown up in such magazines as Newsweek, as well as astronomy publications.
The couple’s partnership in the field is one of the keys to their success, Hallas said.
The work is physically grueling: Photographing an object as it appears to move across the night sky requires a long exposure time. That means monitoring the camera attached to the telescope, possibly for hours, to keep track of what usually is little more than a barely discernible smudge.
A few words of encouragement work wonders when the wonders of the universe, painstakingly documented on film over several hours, can be obliterated in a spirit-crushing instant by the unanticipated appearance of a satellite or aircraft.
“There are periods when you don’t want to go near a telescope for a month or two,” Hallas said. “You get burned out . . . .There’s so many disappointments and cold nights in astrophotography.”
But he is the driving force behind the pair’s work.
Hallas’ academic career at Santa Barbara’s Brooks Institute of Photography was interrupted when he was drafted and did a yearlong tour of duty in Vietnam before returning to graduate in 1973.
Hallas mastered the technical side of the discipline, honing his darkroom expertise in a Miami lab. In 1978, he founded Ventura’s Hallas Photo Lab, doing custom work for such corporate clients as Amgen. It wasn’t until 1985, while checking out the surf through a small telescope from his beachfront apartment, that Hallas noticed a fuzzy-looking object in the sky above the waves. He focused on the light and discovered to his surprise that it had rings around it. Hallas had “discovered” Saturn. “We had no idea up until then there was this vast other world outside our own,” he said.
The next weekend the two were atop Pine Mountain, gaping at the cosmos. After about a year, Hallas thought he would try his hand at duplicating those cool pictures of stars he saw in astronomy books. What he got were “a few squiggly stars.”
Nevertheless, the couple were hooked.
Hallas discovered it was possible to achieve vivid colors by taking two consecutive images and then essentially stacking them together, one atop the other.
Technological advances in the last decade, such as an automated guidance system to track astronomical objects, have revolutionized the field, relieving astrophotographers of much tedium and frustration.
The combination of technology, Hallas’ photographic skills, darkroom techniques and time-consuming trial and error led to images of celestial objects beyond our solar system of almost unprecedented brightness and detail.
Hallas soon found an eager audience. “You don’t feel like a speck in the universe,” Patti Kurtz, photo editor of Astronomy, said of the images’ allure. “That’s why I love my job . . . . I’m looking at God here.”
The Hallases joined a subculture of astrophotographers atop Mt. Pinos, which stands over the Lockwood Valley just beyond the Ventura County line.
Relatively dark skies and a large parking lot atop the 8,831-foot-high peak mean as many as 100 amateur astronomers congregate on summer weekends, their telescopes pointed skyward.
The Hallases are part of a group that has dubbed itself the “Rat Pack,” hard-core astrophotographers who will brave snow and wind, no matter the season, for that elusive shot. That is not to say this is a martini-swilling, carousing bunch along the lines of its Sinatra-led namesake. “We all look like rats after two days of being up there,” Hallas explained.
Astrophotography soon became the Hallases’ life.
In 1992 they founded AstroPhoto, the world’s only lab specializing in astrophotography. That enabled Daphne to quit her job as a registered nurse to work full time on their photography out of their home.
The final decision to purchase their rural Ojai Valley home was based upon how it looked at night--or rather how dark the sky appeared. And a year ago they built an observatory in their backyard to house their large telescope.
Now that Tony has given up his day job, the couple are eager to travel more, especially to shoot the skies of the Southern Hemisphere in Australia.
Recent purchases of sophisticated digital equipment will allow Hallas to push the photographic envelope ever further. And he predicts that a custom-built telescope he has ordered, specifically designed for astrophotography, will elevate standards to even greater heights.
“Astrophotography is a black art,” Hallas said. “There’s voodoo in it all the time. The art in doing this is to minimize what can go wrong--and every now and again you get a masterpiece out of it.”
