A host of heavenly bodies: Dennis Vollink takes his interest in outer space to new heights with computers, telescopes and cameras

There's not much to say beholding a nebula. Interjections underwhelm before these delicate, luminous pearls of the universe, light-years across and light-years away.

Even Dennis Vollink, the man who took the pictures spread across the table, just nods and gestures back to the photographs.

"It's just the wonders of creation," he said after a beat. "How amazing the universe is; what God has created for us to discover out there."

Luckily, Vollink can talk forever about the technical ins and outs of the entire astrophotography process.

His alacrity comes in such a drink-from-the-hydrant stream of scientific concepts that the average bystander is easily lost in space.

Dennis Vollink poses in his home observatory March 21 in Cape Girardeau. (Fred Lynch)

In layman's terms, Vollink takes stunning photographs of a host of heavenly bodies using a complex system of computers, telescopes and cameras. And he captures his front-row view of galaxies and nebulae -- and even our humble moon -- all from his Cape Girardeau home.

"I started just in the garage, but it took forever to bring all the equipment out and set it up when I needed it," he explained. So he built his own observatory onto the top of his house.

"I'm probably the only person in Cape Girardeau [who practices astrophotography]."

But Vollink said he's always been star-struck, even before he watched the '69 moon walk on a television set in a tent at a Michigan air show as a young man itching to join the Air Force.

"I didn't want to become an astronaut, necessarily, but the field," he said. "One of the reasons I went into the [Air Force] academy was my interest in space and astronomers."

Dennis Vollink looks into the telescope in his home observatory Saturday, March 21, 2015 in Cape Girardeau. (Fred Lynch)

So for several years he ended up piloting T-38s as a supersonic jet trainer. A model T-38 now decorates his office in the Drury Inn headquarters in Cape where he works, as does a mouse pad that bears a photograph he took of the sun. For a space-oriented guy, it was a pretty good job during an exciting time.

But what's truly breathtaking, he says, is the progress science has made in just a few decades.

"What's incredible is that the pictures you can take now as an amateur are better than the best of the pictures that NASA had before the moon landing," he said. "The detail, like these rilles here or those shadows, they wouldn't have been able to make those out."

Amateurs themselves have made a good deal of the progress. Astrophotography, at its most basic, involves carefully calibrating a pair of telescopes -- one a viewfinder, the other a camera -- to focus on an object and by incremental adjustments, tracking that object across the night sky for hours of exposure.

And taking the picture is only half the battle. The raw data from a multi-night, 15-hour picture of the California Nebula looks like pretty much nothing. Just blackness.

Dennis Vollink shows images of nebulae and the moon he made from his home observatory Saturday, March 21, 2015 in Cape Girardeau. (Fred Lynch)

Only by using specially designed processing software -- basically space Photoshop -- can a photographer render the raw data into a visible image.

"And a lot of the processing software is written by amateurs, hobbyists who aren't professional astronomers," he explained. "NASA is better at skymapping and the number-crunching, but amateurs are better at making beautiful pictures."

Like the photos Vollink calls his best: a pair of shots of the two complimentary nebulae known as Heart and Soul, which he explained, have gone through several incarnations since the beginning of time, collapsing in and expanding anew like massive cosmic glaciers.

Or the bluish globular clusters, billions-of-years-old stellar snowballs with black holes at their very centers. Or the Lovejoy comet in true color. Or the Rosetta Nebula's moody indigo.

"The more amazing you see space is, the more you realize how amazing the God that created it is," he said.

Dennis Vollink poses for a photo in his home observatory Saturday, March 21, 2015 in Cape Girardeau. (Fred Lynch)

tgraef@semissourian.com

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