On April 23, the Topsfield Town Library hosted Chris Burkinshaw for a lecture titled “Our Solar System and Beyond: Explore Astrophotography.” This was hosted as part of state-wide Massachusetts Space Week festivities. View our presentation here!

About the Presenter: Chris has been fascinated by science and space for as long as he can remember, from early memories of his grandfather talking about Jupiter and Andromeda Galaxy to watching Comet Hale-Bopp arc across the sky as a kid. 

It all changed three years ago when he pointed a Nikon camera at a comet and spotted a faint green dot on the screen. That single image was the beginning of an adventure that has taken him from equatorial mounts and telescopes, to observing the Sun with a spectroheliograph, to building a small radio telescope to detect the arms of the milky way. 

He now images from two locations, a remote telescope in Texas under some of the darkest skies in the country, and home in Massachusetts, where light pollution makes every good image a small act of persistence.