About Charlie Craddock
Charlie Craddock is an artist and amateur astronomer living in Carmel Valley, CA. After finishing at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987 he moved to the Carmel Valley in 2004. There he began observing the night sky, experimenting with astrophotography and incorporating images seen through the telescope into oil paintings. Nebulae and star clusters were particularly generative areas of exploration. Of the dark skies in Cashacua Valley Charlie says, “I had never lived in an area with such a dark sky. After a while working with the telescope I began to experience better night sky seeing. It takes practice. Many of these distant objects don’t look like much at first, faint fuzzies, but if you attach a filter or a CMOS camera they come to life and are visually fascinating light structures of ionized gas and dust.”