Suburban Skies...

The first telescope I ever owned was one I made when I was about ten years old. I pinched the lens out of my Dad's magnifying glass, and the eyepiece out of a toy microscope I had, and mounted them in a cardboard tube. There was a half-Moon that summer evening, and I was so fascinated by the lunar landscape that my Mum had to virtually drag me in to go to bed. I was hooked.

A few years later, the Miner's Strike in 1972 resulted in widespread power cuts, and it was the only time that I can ever recall seeing the Winter Milky Way so clearly, high above Orion, shining in the sky like a glittering, pale silver carpet. Venus, low in the west, was so bright it cast shadows. That Christmas, Mum and Dad had bought me a 10 x 50 pair of binoculars and a Phillips Planisphere, both of which I still have and still use, although my own 10 year old son has come to regard them as his own. I spent many hours that year, scanning the evening sky and learning the constellations.

Then came the world of work, and for over twenty years I neglected the sky above for the more mundane issues related to earning a living. It wasn't until my own son was born that I started looking at the night sky again.

I can't remember what catalysed the decision to buy a "proper" telescope. I do remember getting a good bonus that year, and with my partner's permission, I decided to buy a Vixen VC200L, with a "GoTo" drive unit. What an amazing instrument. I was transported back to my childhood in many ways, only this time I had thousands of deep sky objects to view, often in breathtaking detail.

My first sights of M57, M13, the Orion Nebula and the rings of Saturn showing the Cassini division led me to spend many more hours under the night sky, on some occasions from dusk to dawn. Needless to say, my better half put her foot down about these all-night marathons, especially as at the time I was travelling a fair distance to work every day.

It was only a matter of time before I tried my hand at astrophotography. My first efforts at emulsion photography with the VC200L were pretty awful, but digital cameras were just becoming available for the first time. I finally bought a 3.3MB (which at the time was a "wow") camera, and never touched a film camera again.

My first astrophotograph with a digital camera is above. It was taken in late 2001, I don't have a date. I do remember that I just speculatively pointed the camera at the 25mm eyepiece I had trained on the nearly-full moon, and being astounded at the detail that subsequently emerged on my computer screen.

I've never looked back. For three years I imaged all sorts of objects, simply by mounting the camera on a home-made bracket that clamped on the eyepiece of my VC200L. That camera was capable of 60 second exposures at ISO 400 or 800, although the noise these early cameras generated for such frames was horrendous. Some of the results were quite encouraging however, and I certainly learnt my way around PaintShopPro 7 as the imaging processing software to clean up my noisy, light polluted raw frames.

But when my old digital camera finally died, I finally treated myself to a Starlight Xpress CCD.

This is in a different league, and it's an instrument I'm still learning to get the best out of.