AstroPhotography,...
I guess I am a AstroPhotographer.
One day long ago I was standing in the bottom of the Grand Canyon at night. At the time the night sky was "pretty" to me. As you probably know, when your out in the middle of nowhere and it gets dark, there's not much to do. I wasn't tired so I figured I'd mount my cheap 60mm 20x spotter on the tripod and have a look at "that bright star".
Turned out to be Jupiter which wasn't much of a surprise, but I had never seen any of it's moons save for in photographs.
Four little white dots scattered along a line. In that brief instant of wonder just before logic and knowledge took over I knew instinctively what these were. Logic then loudly announced "Yup, those are moons alright."
I was fascinated.
It was an epiphany.
Thus began my Astronomical Journey in 2006. The night sky is still "pretty" to me, but I have come to know its beauty in much deeper ways than I could have ever imagined. The 60mm spotter still serves me well but has been replaced by something much more sophisticated.
My Rig as of today, in no particular order:
OTAs - Celestron C9.25 F10/F6.3, Orion ST120 F5 refractor. These get along quite nicely on an ADM dual saddle on The Mount.
The Mount - Orion Atlas AZ-EQ GEM
ZWO ASI1600MM-Cool main imager
ZWO ASI174MM guiding imager
Xagyl 8 slot 1.25" filter wheel
C9.25 focuser Optec TCF-S
ST120 focuser - handmade Arduino controlled, based on Robert Brown's excellent github repository.
Software - CdC, PixInsight, SGP, GIMP
The Main Camera specializes in high resolution, short exposure, low noise images. As a consequence it is not uncommon for me to set The Rig up and take hundreds of 30 second images in one night. The more you take, the better the detail you can produce in software.
Enough narrative, here are some images,...