Welcome to my personal astronomy website!
I am just a lover of space. I’ve loved it since I was a small child, when I had a moon map on my wall and glow in the dark stars on my ceiling. I made a model of the Hubble Space Telescope out of coffee cans and aluminum foil for a fifth grade science project. And, of course, there was a styrofoam model solar system a few years later. I had a small refractor when I was a child but never learned to fully utilize it.
I invested in a 12″ dobsonian telescope in early 2019 to finally view the heavens. Unfortunately, I was let down by the views from my backyard, and I quickly learned about connecting a DSLR to the focuser. After getting my feet wet with the normal beginner targets like M42, I built an equatorial platform for the telescope out of plywood and a DC motor so that it would track the sky. This, unfortunately, was not accurate enough to image for more than a few seconds at a time. I upgraded to a professionally made equatorial platform, and it allowed me to take multiple-minute long exposures. However, I could only image a target for about 60 minutes with it.
I was totally hooked on astrophotography. It allowed me to see things I never could with my eye. In early 2020, I made the big jump into a heavy duty equatorial mount, faster 12″ astrograph, and a high quality, cooled, dedicated astronomy camera. I am learning and improving constantly, and I am having an absolute blast along the way.
I image mostly deep space objects, such as galaxies and nebula, from my backyard observatory. It is almost completely automated, and software can control the entire operation while I sleep peacefully. Each image I make usually takes many nights, sometimes weeks, to gather data for and process. I take hundreds of images of a target, each image being a four minute exposure. Taking a four minute exposure of something moving while maintaining the utmost in clarity and detail is a real challenge, and there is a lot that goes into photographing the ever-moving sky. I use software to combine and average all of the data into one image to increase detail and decrease noise. These objects in the sky are extremely dim, and the light pollution in the sky where I live makes imaging these targets even more challenging.
This site is divided into two main parts: blog posts and image galleries. I have many posts about images and the different aspects of equipment and software that goes into this hobby. All images on this site, particularly deep space images, are clickable to view a high resolution image.
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