Amateur Astronomy has grown tremendously in the last several years. When I was a

boy growing up, I saved for a 4 inch reflector when I was in Junior High School and

was awed by the wonders overhead. Of course, photography was so difficult as to be

almost out of the question. I did photograph the moon, and got passable images of the

Saturn and Jupiter, but Galaxies and Nebula required long exposures, and telescope

tracking was out of my budget, and even then, the motors available for inexpensive

telescopes could not do the job that was required.

Moving forward 40 years things have changed, well,

astronomically. Modern telescopes, with optics

configured by computers have excellent quality, and their

mounts and motors are accurate at tracking. To make

matters even better, technology borrowed from the

Hubble Space Telescope allows cameras to lock onto a

guide star and keep the telescope and camera pointed

toward an object for hours without varying more than a

pixel.(!)

Camera performance has also improved. No longer based

on film, the latest imagers use CCD chips, and the images produced can be seen right

away. It all makes for a much more pleasant and productive evening.

We have recently moved from Seattle to Arizona which has pretty much solved the

weather problem. Tucson has some of the clearest, best quality skies in the U.S. And

we are building an observatory to house my equipment and cut set-up time. My

equipment consists of a Meade 10" Schmidt-Cassegrain

Telescope. It sits on a Bisque Paramount ME German

Equatorial Mount which guides the telescope to follow the

object it is pointed to as the Earth turns. The mount sits on a

Pier-Tech elevating pier that raises the telescope out of its

enclosure. Recently I added a Takahashi 4" refractor for wide

field views. I don't look through the telescope very often

because the camera is usually hooked up where the eyepiece

is. It's a CCD Camera especially designed for shooting deep

sky images made by Santa Barbara Instruments Group. They

are pretty much the standard camera for serious amateurs

and even University observatories.

To look at some of my latest images explore the galleries by clicking on the buttons

above.