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 an carbon fiber ASA N12 f/3.8 corrected newtonian astrograph (mine actually is f/3.5). Other equipment include an Astro-Physics 155 EDF f/7 refractor (with a full field reducer I can image at f/5.36), STL-11000M CCD camera, FLI Proline -16803 CCD camera, ST-402e camera on a MiniBorg 60mm f/5.4 guidescope, and an Astro-Physics 1200 GTO mount. I have these in a clamshell dome which I call Starsearch Observatory. I run the mount and telescope from my kitchen table using a Netgear wireless network. I also have a Takahashi FSQ-106 f/5 refractor with a FLI Microline-11002M. It is on a Takahashi EM-200 Temma II mount. Finally, I have an Orion XT10i with controller for ocasional deepsky observing.
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Photo Courtesy of Doug Lindley, Idaho State Journal
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Astro-Physics refractor setup
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