About

My Stargazing Journey

Growing up in South Florida I learned to love space. Seemingly everyone was excited about living close to the Kennedy Space Center. We all watched all the Apollo flights and all Space Shuttle flights. Seeing them taking off was an amazing sight. Just the thought of being able to go into space was intriguing. My first telescope was something my parent probably paid $10 for, I loved it. I always enjoyed going to the Planetarium and learning about the universe. When I was a kid I used to follow one of the best stargazers; Jack Horkheimer. He made space fun. He was one the people at the Planetarium and he had a show on PBS. He would tell us what to look for, when and how.

Now I live in rural Pennsylvania

This is a site is all about my new star gazing journey. This blog is what I have learned about equipment, what I have seen, how to find great objects in our skies and how to process your images into creations.

My goal is to share my experiences, my failures and my success. This is not an easy hobby. It’s expensive, it is time consuming and it is full of let downs. But when you grab that great shot of a DSO, Planet or Cluster, it makes all the let downs seem like they never happened.

My Current Equipment

Telescopes: Celestron 9.25″ SCT – Native F10 @ 2350mm on a Celestron AVX Mount
Celestron 8″ SCT – Native F10 @ 2032mm on a Celestron Evolution Mount
Celestron 8″ Starsense Explorer Dobsonian

Guiding: Celestron StarSense Autoguider one for each SCT

Imaging: Starzona Hyperstar-4 – Allows for F1.9 @ 390mm
Starizona SCT Corrector 4 0.63x Focal Reducer/Coma Corrector

Camera: ZWO ASI2600 MC Pro
SVBONY 405CC

Filters: Antlia Triband RGB Ultra – 2″
SVBONY UV/IR Cut – 2″
And a bunch I don’t use (part of the aggravation)

My Journey

After my wife passed away My son suggested I get a telescope. For Christmas 2022 he gave me money to get one. I added money to it and bought a Celestron 8″ Starsense Explorer Dobsonian. This scope grabs some light! For visual astronomy, this is a great scope. You use a cellphone to tell you where to aim the scope and look at objects with a 2″ eyepiece.

I wanted more, I wanted to take pictures. So I bought the Celestron 8″ Evolution and the Svbony 405cc camera. I quickly found out about tracking. The Evolution’s mount would track ok if the duration was 30 seconds or less. I have some excellent pictures of stars, like Arcturus, Polaris, Antares, Vega and Spica. I still have the mount – just in case.

I bought the Celstron AVX mount. I was tracking better but still not great. It was not until I introduced my Celestron Starsense Autoguider to the mix before I could really track and grab some great DSO images. But even this had a steep learning curve and I made a lot of mistakes.

As I was getting better as imaging, I made another mistake and purchased at Celestron .063 reducer. I don’t have a high opinion of it. Who knows, maybe it was me. I made up for this mistake by buying a SVBONY 405CC cooled color camera. It has all the same specs as the ASI1204. This was a good buy and I got lucky with imaging more often. Still had a lot of flops!! (Still do!).

My next purchase as the Starzona Hyperstar-4 – Oh boy, Home Run!!! This took imaging to a whole new level. F1.9 means, a 30 second sub is about the same as a 5 min sum at F10. And the field of view is much larger.

Life changed the day, I somehow broke the usb-3 jack on the camera. Svbony was great, they said they would fix it for free under warranty. But, I had to mail it to China and the turn around time was 3 to 4 months. I was just starting to get better at this, I wanted to keep riding the wave.

I bought a ZWO ASI2600MC Pro. Another Homer!!! Some of my best images came from the Hyperstar ASI2600 combination. Struggles lessened considerable.

Just as I thought I was done, I picked up a used Celestron 9.25″ SCT with another Celestron StarSense Autoguider.

Software

For imaging on a Windows computer I use Sharpcap.

For imaging on a MAC, I use Cloudmaker’s AstroImager. Don’t let the silly music in the video’s fool you. This is solid software!

For processing images, I use PixInsight. I have not tried anything else. I fell in love with all the add-ons and tools people make for this.

For mount control, I use Celestron’s CPWI. I have used both SkyPortal and SkySafari on my phone. But, the Wifi is to problematic.

I use a 100 foot USB-3 cable, to connect my camera, my mount, my auto-guider and my computer together. WORKS FLAWLESSLY!