About Me
Astronomy
I still have a poster from long ago displaying the planets, details about them, and information about various astronomical phenomena. I’ve always had some enjoyment of the cosmos and kept that enjoyment alive moving forward. I’ve always liked the uniqueness of astronomy, the diversity of objects in the sky, and the vastness of everything that we’re able to see from earth. I also love the amount of things that we can know about space in the modern world using technology that hasn’t been available to mankind before, as well as the abundance of information we can so easily get access to. Astronomy is a pursuit that we can follow for a lifetime and is one that I plan to do for awhile.
In the summer of 2016 I decided to look around for a telescope and after some research, I decided on an SCT because of the versatility of targets that it can image as well as the great go-to technology that many come with. I enjoyed quite a few nights of looking at planets and the moon through the Celestron Nexstar 8se I got from a local pawn shop.
Astrophotography
I hadn’t intended to do photography when I originally got the telescope, but as everyone does, I wanted to capture the razor sharp images of the moon that popped into the eyepiece. Holding a phone over the eyepiece to try to capture an image at the right angle is quite the task! I wanted more images from the scope to complement the viewing I was enjoying with it.
I eventually looked into imaging more formally and got the appropriate t-adapter for the Nikon DSLR I acquired (for both daytime and astro usage). After some moon shots, my first deep sky shot was a horribly out of focus attempt at M42; it will not win any awards! After discovering the magic of stacking images to bring out signal that isn’t even visible, I continued all the way to the present with astrophotography. What once was a simple endeavor with an alt-az mount and Deep Sky Stacker is now a detailed process including an equatorial mount, automated image capture, auto focuser, off-axis guider, and Pixinsight.
Tutorials & Guides
I’ve been teaching as a career for quite a few years now and it’s definitely what I like doing. I usually spend a lot of time learning about the things I pursue and enjoy putting that knowledge to use for my own endeavors as well as showing it to others who want to learn; there are countless tutorials, blog posts, equipment reviews and forum posts I consulted in my thousands of hours of doing astrophotography and getting that information back out there can save people a lot of time if they want to read into the topics without investing hundreds of hours to find these things out the hard way.
You’ll find tutorials, equipment reviews and various blog post topics on this site that offer information and discussions on the things I’ve worked on during this process. I ultimately plan to have a full archive of post-processing examples, image details, equipment reviews and general astrophotography how-tos.
Miscellaneous
My love for science really relates to a lot of the concepts studied to successfully pursue astrophotography and I’ve enjoyed designing and making things (such as an autofocuser) that help push my progress forward! It’s been great continuing with my other pursuits as well, and they often go hand-in-hand.