Every week, SkyNews publishes the best image from among those sent in by readers from all across Canada. This panel of judges chooses those pictures. With decades of amateur astronomy and astrophotography experience, our judges are looking for images that are technically and artistically beautiful, representing the night sky as depicted by Canadians.
Daniel Meek
Daniel Meek is a member of the RASC Calgary Centre and a retired project manager.
He built his first Newtonian telescope when he was 14 years old through a workshop at the Calgary planetarium. Although he has had a lifelong fascination with the night sky, he only been doing astrophotography about 10 years. He images from his backyard observatory.
He is a former member of the RASC Robotic Telescope Astrophotography team and the RASC Robotic Telescope Operations team.
Stephen Holmes
As a young lad growing up in Toronto in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I was profoundly affected by the space race. Not so much as a competition, but as a great adventure. Although I pursued a career in the chemical field in the whole gamut of sales, marketing, tech service and technical, it was always astronomy and the idea of this huge 3D universe that was a siren song for me. Approaching retirement, I knew EXACTLY what I wanted to do.
Coincidentally, my family bought me a Dobsonian telescope for my birthday in 2002, which I quickly traded in on a 10-inch LX200GPS and spent two years in imaging hell. But I learned a lot. But then, about 2007, with new equipment, I started producing some acceptable deep-sky images. My involvement with RASC has been continuous since then, and as a member of the Kitchener-Waterloo Centre, I organize the “Stargazers 101” meetings we have monthly in addition to our main meetings.
Former judges
Doug MacDonald is a member of Victoria RASC, a former journalist and photographer.
He grew up in northern Ontario where the stars were always brilliant, and was fascinated by astronomy since taking a freshman astronomy course at university.
He has been doing astrophotography seriously for 14 years, with many years of visual astronomy before that.
