Scanner: Plustek OpticFilm 8200i

NOTE: This is one of a few images I took atr the Ashton-Wildwood Observatory back in the 1980's using a 5.5-inch Celestron Schmidt Camera (briefly donated to the AWO by club member Keith Jamison). Likely I was the only one that attempted to use it (it was sold some time later). It was a difficult to use instrument. It had several individual and magnetic film mounts. You would have to take them into the dark room and load them, which for color film had to be sight unseen, cut them to length, and put them in a light tight box. After hoping that you properly tracked the exposure, transfer it back to the chamber and take it to a darkroom for processing. So how do you process the individual slices of film? I would mount it in a plastic slide mount and attach them to small binder clips that were strung to a wire coat hanger and place them inside a regular small round steel processor intended for roll film, and process perhaps up to 4 images at one time. For color slides it would take 9 different processing baths and an hour to process them. Indeed because of the large amount of handling there would typically be several scratches and processing blemish's left behind. It was very difficult to get a good image, here are a few good to not so good images.

(Stars 09)