Welcome!

This page is about my on again, off again hobby of amateur astronomy. Most normal people just do their hobby and don't post about it. But most of the time I am not actually "doing" astronomy so this is my busy-wait. I can't imagine anyone would find this page accidentally so you probably know me. Let's grab a beer sometime!

I have lost track of when I bought my first telescope. It was probably around 2007 when I lived in Manalapan NJ, and it was the Orion SkyQuest XT8, a mid-level reflector telescope. Bigger is better in man toys, so the next scope was an Orion XT10 with Intelliscope. It was a monster: I needed a handcart to take it out to the backyard. I used that for a couple years, but for various reasons I stopped a few years later and sold everything. Fast forward to 2017. My nerdiness told me I had to own a telescope. This time I opted for the small Orion ST120, which turned out to be ill suited for me and I didn't use it much. But I was officially into astronomy again.

In 2020, we moved to Edison NJ. (Ironically, this was so that my wife could be closer to her workplace, but for the next two years we worked from home due to Covid!) I had complained about the light pollution in Manalapan but I had no idea that I was actually fortunate there. I went from a decent dark sky there to a Bortle 8 sky (one level from the worst) here. One can barely see a few of the brightest stars at night. Astronomy for me was done.

Or was it? I stumbled across material that showed astrophotography from Bortle 8 skies: it takes a lot more time and some image post-processing skills, but there it was. This looked promising. I had a telescope. I had a DSLR camera. I had spare time. How hard could it be? (Yes, a little foreshadowing.) And so it started...

Thanks for reading and cheers for now,
Shaun

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