I enjoyed stargazing for years, but over the last decade, the local light pollution became so bad that visual observing through the eyepiece became pointless. The equipment I own (a very cheap 8" Newtonian, with an even cheaper Equatorial mount) made photo exposures of even 60 seconds worthless, so I didn't pursue astrophotography. Then a few years ago, the mount and tripod were damaged by some bad weather-and there they sat, and I focused instead on regular photography.
Early in 2011, while doing a lot of cleaning and yard recovery, I decided to have a go at putting it all back together. With some work, the tripod was made stable enough to get by, and I had since learned about various software packages for stacking short digital exposures to get the effect of a long film exposure. This I had to try...
So this blog is to give myself a record of my progress, both as I continue to improve my equipment (there is no budget for new gear, so I have been gradually re-machining and rebuilding what I have) and as my processing skills improve. The early entries are pretty unexciting, especially in this day of Hubble images, but even these bad shots show more than what I was ever able to see visually; I still find this exciting. I hope over time that anyone looking will see a steady path of improvement in what I post.
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