All text, photographs, software and web page designs on these pages copyright © 1999 - 2010 by Ulrich Beinert, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. They may not be reproduced in any form, including electronically on the Internet, without written permission of the author. Thank you for respecting the intellectual property rights protected by the Copyright laws of the United States and new International Copyright treaty.
You may use the images and software from these pages on your personal computer, but you may not reproduce the text, photographs, software and web page designs on your homepage, nor may you post them to a WWW, FTP or BBS site.
I have worked very hard to produce the contents of these pages, spending lots of time and money to get the results I have managed to achieve. It has not been easy, as hundreds of images may have to be taken for one to be good enough to show here. Getting this web site to look the way it does now has required hundreds of hours of hard work, often late into the night. These pages were originally created in FrontPage Express, but I now work solely with Notepad, which, even though it allows me much greater control over the final look of the pages, is much more difficult and time-consuming.
Therefore, I believe it is my right to protect my work and decide how it is used. The Copyright law was established to give creative artists the legal right to such projection along with the right to profit from their labors. If someone wishes to profit from my work, I wish to share in that profit, a reasonable and fair concept. If you wish to use my work for educational or artistic purposes, but not in any type of idealogical, political or religious way, just contact me and ask, as I will usually grant permission for this use. I will usually not grant permission for my work to be used on other web sites, as people will have no reason to visit my site if they can see my images elsewhere and as I will have no way of guaranteeing that copyright and contact information stay with the images and software. Authors of astronomical books can contact me on the terms of using my images in their publications - usually I'm happy to receive no more than one or two free copies of the book.
If you wish to use the images and on your own computer for personal use, that is a right granted to you by the copyright law. Feel free to download and use them, but on your computer only. You may not pass them on to others, as distribution is a right granted to me, the creator, by the copyright law. If someone you know is interested in the images, please point them in the direction of my web site, where they can view and download them for themselves. The right to distribution may seem strange, but has a reason. Many of the people that get my images by being passed from hand to hand will never visit my web site and see all of what I have offered there. Some of these people may buy prints and others may find something else that they wish to use commercially.
I did not get into astrophotography for making money. I got into this hobby to record, for myself, the beauty of the night sky. I enjoy sharing that beauty with others in every way possible, the reason for having a public web site. However, as I have said previously, if you wish to use my work to make money, it is my wish and my right to have my share of your profit.
Therefore, if you are interested in using these images for any reason, please don't hesitate to ask. Provided your reason for using them is legitimate and agrees with my ideas for their use, I will usually grant permission.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this.
