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None of the photographs on this site have actually been taken through a telescope. They are pictures from regular old 35mm cameras (and I mean old), or in some cases from a 120 format camera. This doesn't mean that I don't wish I had some nice astrophotographs of glowing nebulas and swirling galaxies, just that I haven't progressed to that degree of skill.
I have been working up to the equipment needed. Here is a progression of how I got to this point.
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When I became interested in astronomy a few years ago I dipped my toe in the waters of optical instruments by buying a pair of 7x50 Nikon binoculars. This provided a beautiful confirmation that the moons around Jupiter were visible in binoculars (I couldn't get over it!) and it exposed layers of stars that were invisible to me before.
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Having passed the first test of whether this was just a passing interest, I fretted over what kind of telescope I should get, and would I really still remain interested. I finally decided on a Meade 8-inch Newtonian, the largest scope that would still fit into my car. "First light" for my new scope was in March 1996, Mars was my target, and I was so disappointed with the wavy pink smudge that I retreated to the house to feel miserable for a few hours about the folly I had fallen to. I returned later to retrieve the telescope but before packing up took another look. Remarkably, Mars was now a sharp stable little disk with possibly a whitish mark at one end! Stars were pinpoints of blue sparkling in a black field. The moon had a zillion sharp-rimmed craters.
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It was an emotional lesson about thermal effects. The mixing of air in the telescope tube carried from the warm house to the cool March night, caused the churning I had seen earlier. After the air was uniform, and the mirror at the same temperature, the image stabilized. I have since learned more about telescopes, as I made my own modifications to the Meade. I equipped it with a better focusser and replaced the finder scope with one that had an erect image prism, a wonderful improvement for someone finding his way by starhopping. I even installed Dobsonian "ears" onto the tube and built a collapsible base that I could bring along on camping trips (above photo).
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It has been a few years since those first nervous purchases, and I now seem to have progressed from dipping a toe to diving recklessly into the deep unknown. In the last year I have acquired various pieces of equipment whose purpose is for a more serious (if not more successful) attempt at astrophotography. After making valiant efforts to bring the Meade equatorial mount to the performance needed for photographic tracking, I finally gave up and purchased a Losmandy GM-8 mount, a piece of equipment that when I took delivery, looked to me like something from an exotic optics lab, a finely-machined and beautifully finished precision assembly. I didn't dare take it outside. But, resolving not to own something too nice to use, I took it out anyway.
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My long range plans started to form. I wanted a more compact and faster scope. It would need a guidescope. A guidescope that could be used on its own as a nice visual observing scope, maybe even someday to take pictures through, one that transported easily. A Televue-85. I got it just in time to take on a business trip to Arizona which I extended over a weekend for my purposes of photographing the Milky Way. It was a pleasure to use (you can see the silhouette of its dewshield in the last frame of Winter Milky Way).
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I now believe that the most important and expensive part of a telescope is the mechanical design. The optics are important of course, but if the mechanical function of the telescope is poor, it will be a constant aggravation, detracting from the experience of using an otherwise fine instrument. The next part of my plan is to replace the 8" Meade with a shorter faster Newtonian...
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