I'll start at the end of my story and show you my recent astro-photos that have mainly been taken since Covid-19 forced me to find an at-home outlet for my interests. After you've watched this slide show of my recent astro-photos I hope you'll return here to go back 55 years in my life story.
I've enjoyed Astronomy since I was about 10 years old when my parents bought me a Tasco 3-inch refractor telescope for Christmas. Through that scope I saw the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, several double stars such as Albireo and Mizar, and the Pleiades. I'm sure I tried for some other deep-sky objects, but aside from the Pleiades they were all too faint to see from my suburban light polluted back yard, especially with the wobbly tripod on that scope and the nearly-useless 3/4-inch diameter finder scope. But even with those roadblocks, that Christmas gift was enough to spark my life-long interest in Astronomy, and I thank my parents for that inspirational Christmas gift long ago.
In 1984, I did some moonlighting work for a prior employer that let me afford to buy a serious telescope: a Meade model 826 8-inch diameter f/6 Newtonian telescope on a beefy German Equatorial non-driven mount so I could finally see all the deep-sky objects I'd read about in my childhood but had never seen. I really enjoyed using that scope and saw a lot of deep-sky objects with it, including all the Messier Objects. Here are my observations of the Messier Objects, and here is the award I was given for observing all of the Messier Objects, awarded by the Astronomical League due to my membership in a constituent club, the Warren Astronomical Society.
As I outgrew the 8-inch telescope, I challenged myself to home-build a larger telescope by hand. In 1993 I finished building a 15-inch diameter telescope that I used for about 10 years. It was also a Newtonian telescope, this time on a non-driven Dobsonian truss-tube mount. I hand-ground the 15-inch diameter primary mirror over a year's time in my basement, and designed and built the entire mount and structure myself. The only things I bought already-made were the 3-inch by 2-inch elliptical secondary mirror (it's difficult to grind a perfectly flat mirror, surprisingly enough), the focuser which holds the eyepiece, and the eyepieces themselves. I modified my childhood Tasco telescope for use as a finder-scope. I loved using that 15-inch scope, and saw a lot of objects that were too faint to be seen in the 8-inch, and saw a lot more detail in the objects bright enough to see in that 8-inch scope (the wider the diameter of a telescope, the more detail can be seen). Plus, there was undoubtedly a feeling of pride in making all these observations with something I'd built with my own two hands. With that 15-inch telescope, I observed the next level of the Astronomical League's observing challenge, the Herschel 400 List. My observations of these difficult 400 objects was rewarded with my Herschel 400 Certificate, the 70th ever issued, on October 24, 1991. William Herschel observed the sky with 6-inch, 12-inch, and 18-inch diameter telescopes and catalogued over 2,400 objects, including the 400 Herschel Objects which the Astronomical League selected for their observing award.
I continued observing with my 15-inch scope for several years. Most of these observations, though, required a 45-minute drive to a relatively dark farmland site to get away from the big city light pollution, therefore involved a non-trivial investment of planning, effort, loading up the car, loss of sleep, and a 45-minute return-to-home drive in the final hour before sunrise, unloading the car, entry of observations into my database, and updating my planning. I can't believe that my wife at that time put up with that baloney for so long. That, in addition to the fact that the 15-inch scope was a heavy backbreaker and as my back aged and I became tired of the back pain, mosquito bites, unexpected clouds or fog ruining my nights, heavy dew soaking my telescope mirror, lenses and maps, and the extreme winter cold, I became less inclined to use it. That scope has sat essentially idle in my garage for over 15 years now.
But recently, due to my interest in Photography, my Astronomical interest has been rejuvenated. With today's digital camera sensors and some free software, Astronomy has become accessible once again to this lazy old man. I can setup my camera on a star tracking mount in my backyard to take a hundred 30- or 60-second exposures of an object while I watch TV or sleep inside, them combine those photos in my computer the next morning while sipping coffee, resulting in views I never could have hoped to achieve at the eyepiece during my youth. The camera, collecting light for hours at a time, easily beats my eyeballs with no capacity for time-exposure, at seeing the faint objects Charles Messier and William Herschel passed down to me. My recent astro-photos are shown here, the same photos I showed you at the top of this page.
