Equipment
Like a lot of amateur astronomers, I started taking images of the night sky because what I saw through the eyepiece was not what I was seeing on the printed page. As a boy, I frequented our local library and checked out every astronomy book that I could find. I would spend countless hours looking over the pictures taken by professional astronomers from places like Palomar Mountain and Mt. Wilson. When I finally got my first telescope (age 12) I was less than impressed by what I saw. The little (60mm) Sears refractor didn't show me any of the fantastic images that I saw in those books. None-the-less, I was able to see the rings of Saturn and "bam" I was hooked. It wasn't until years later that I was able to return to the night sky. After finishing school, my family and I moved to southeast Idaho. The sky was darker than anywhere I had previously lived -- so I started back into astronomy. I first imaged with film; an OM-1 piggybacked on a Celestron-8 SCT. After some success I decided to go with CCD imaging. My first camera was an ST-237 with color wheel. It helped me learn the process of taking color CCD images and begin down the road of image processing.
My current telescope project is a carbon fiber ASA N12 f/3.8 corrected newtonian astrograph (mine actually is f/3.5) attached to an SBIG STL-11000M CCD camera. They ride atop an Astro-Physics 1200 GTO mount. I have these in a clamshell dome which I call Starsearch Observatory 1. Other equipment includes an Astro-Physics 155 EDF f/7 refractor (with a full field reducer I can image at f/5.37) with an FLI Proline -16803 CCD camera. These are currently in Australia at an observatory I share with narrowband imager John Gleason. Also, an ST-402e camera with e-finder (one for each of my setups -- three), and a TeleVue-127is f/5.4 refractor with an FLI Microline-11002M which sit atop a Takahashi EM-200 Temma II mount. This is Starsearch Observatory 2 and this setup is on wheels, so I can wheel them out of the garage. I run all three setups from my kitchen table using a wireless network. I also have a Takahashi FSQ-106 f/5 refractor. Finally, I have an Orion XT10i with controller for ocasional deepsky observing. I prefer large binoculars, however.
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Photo Courtesy of Doug Lindley, Idaho State Journal
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Astro-Physics refractor setup
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