Wednesday, January 18, 2006

I'm a relative newcomer to both astonomy and photography (as of the writing of this profile 1/18/06, it has been 2.33 years since my first telescope and 1.5 years since my first "serious" camera). My current telescope is a 9.25" Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain on a goto German Equatorial mount. A few good photos (sun and moon) were taken with my 2nd telescope, a 10" Discovery Dobsonian by simply aiming the camera at the eyepiece! My camera is the Canon Digital Rebel SLR (the one with the naughty infrared filter). I take 4 basic types of photographs: 1) stationary tripod for startrails and short exposures (like the moon) using only a camera lens, 2) piggyback technique, in which the camera rides ON the telescope (but doesn't look THROUGH it) so that the motor drive on the mount allows the camera to track objects across the sky for longer exposures, 3) prime-focus deep-sky photography requiring Taurus Tech's Tracker III camera adaptor (without the benefit of an autoguider or laptop!) and 4) eyepiece projection planetary photos using the ScopeTronix MaxView adaptor. I've also used the CCD cameras, telescopes and computer hard/software of New Mexico Skies to take some amazing photographs while out there. I live in Vineland, NJ (not the darkest location on the well-lit east coast, for sure) but I've had some luck here and have travelled to take many of my photographs. This site shall remain an incomplete work-in-progress of my best efforts.