Travis Deyoe: Astrophotographer

Piercing blue torches of light, fuchsia flashes in the dark like glitter spilled across a stage, nebulas with rims as red as blood, sprawling seas of pink and purple stardust, the smoky yellow of backlit gases: these are the colors that infuse Travis Deyoe’s photographs

Deyoe takes pictures the way you might take images with a DSLR, except instead of portraits and landscapes, his subjects are distant galaxies, nebulas, and shimmering star clusters – and instead of taking fully formed photos with the click of a button, the telescopes he uses can only process one color at a time.  Astrophotography involves experimentation and time: taking photos of the same object through different filters to pick up individual colors the way our eyes see them, often using multi-hour exposures to capture the dim light traveling from objects dozens of millions of light-years away. Because the choices made about exposure lengths and image stacking all vary according to the photographer’s preferences and curiosities, no two astrophotographers can ever capture quite the same image. It is an art as much as a science.

Deyoe first arrived at UA as an undergrad in 2010, taking classes in engineering and astronomy and slowly clarifying his interest in telescope use and public outreach. It was during these exploratory years that he attached a photo he had taken of the Pinwheel Galaxy in an email to the renowned astrophotographer Adam Block, inquiring if he could volunteer at the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter. Since then, Deyoe has become one of three full-time employees at the SkyCenter, has taken scores of his own striking astronomy photos, and has empowered a steady stream of visitors to view the sky through the mountain’s telescopes—or even to try their hand at astrophotography themselves (interested? You can do it, too!). His most recent capture was a supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy—one of the brightest in the last decade. (Read more about Steward Observatory researchers’ involvement in this unique event here).

Green, Deyoe says, is the rarest of colors in space. Comets show up as green, but little else. But what he loves capturing the most is the absence of color – dark nebulas showing up against bright cosmic backgrounds like ink falling through water.

When he’s not busy working toward his goal of capturing all 110 objects from Charles Messier’s 18^th century Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters, you can find him behind the scenes at Tucson’s Valley of the Moon, directing theater.