Yeh great stuff, as a teenager I remember seeing plates from the Crossley peppered throughout Burnhams Celestial Handbook and thinking, imagine being able to take shots like that...well, eventually imagination turned to reality and then some
What makes the images even more impressive is that they were very long exposures and manually guided.
The Pleiades image was a 4 hr exposure.
Makes us modern day astromiagers look spoilt by comparison. We are in the comfort of our homes, many soundly asleep, while technology does all the work.
What I found amazing is that as I was scrolling through the images I called them all by their modern names
That is a great collection.
Mike, yep I know what you mean about the advance is amatuer Astrophotography.
I look through our club's Astronomy Books (some old, some not all that old) and I notice that even beginners in astrophotography nowdays take better images than the ones in these Astronomy Books!
Makes us modern day astromiagers look spoilt by comparison. We are in the comfort of our homes, many soundly asleep, while technology does all the work.
Regards
Steven
Well, not all of us still
Although the biggest advance as far as physical ease improvement goes, is reliable autoguidng...in the past to go 60min slumped over with your eye glued to a guide eyepiece was common but a struggle, 90min or 2 hrs was done on occassions but was very tough and thus very rare.
I have had Patrick Moore's Stars of the Southern sky from when I was only 14 (38 years ago). I remember this book fondly as one of the reasons I got into Astronomy... I look at the pictures now and see washed out colour, eggy stars, lack of definition, lack of stretching and development. Many of these pictures were taken with the 200 inch Mt Palomar telescope which was the largest at the time and yet many of the pictures in my waste bin are better! I still have a soft spot for the book and will never throw it away.
Although the biggest advance as far as physical ease improvement goes, is reliable autoguidng...in the past to go 60min slumped over with your eye glued to a guide eyepiece was common but a struggle, 90min or 2 hrs was done on occassions but was very tough and thus very rare.
I remember doing a 2 hr manually guided exposure on top of Mt Donna Buang in the middle of winter.
It wasn't helped being interrogated under torch light from a police patrol from nearby Warburton who thought the sight of an individual slowly freezing to death was worth investigating.
Two hours manually guiding tested my physical limit, there is no way I could have gone 4 hours.
James Keeler who took the Pleiades image must have been one tough character.
It would be fun to put a CCD camera on that scope today. Facinating to see that the book shows many of the showpiece objects that amateur's go after today. Hey look, I did the Iris Nebula. Oh, drat, they did it back in 1900. ;-)
...well, eventually imagination turned to reality and then some 
