The first entry in my Astrophotography Blog...

This Blog is intended to be a record of my developing skills, successes and failures in capturing images of the night sky.  I'll make a separate entry describing who I am and what my astro-photography experience is... Suffice to say, I have had very few successful attempts to capture images, especially when weighed against the equipment and software I've acquired in my previous attempts.  Here's a brief list of the equipment I currently possess:

Meade 12" LX-200GPS-SMT (2004-era scope)
Coronado SolarMax 90 Double Stack Hydrogen-Alpha scope
Meade Ultra-Wedge
Canon 5d Mark II
Williams Optics Zenithstar 80mm refractor
Losmandy dovetail-plate system for the Meade scope
Orion Off-Axis Guider
Meade 1:1.6 focal reducer
Orion Flip Mirror
12volt car-battery charger - powers the Meade
Vixen Alt-Az manual mount for SolarMax scope

Notice there is no dome mentioned in the above list... I have to drag this out and pack it up before/after every observing session.  This will continue for at least the next 3 years, so no permanent installations are possible for the foreseeable future.

Late-May weather in VA-permitting, I'll be attempting to improve the collimation on the Meade tonight...  So far, the meade's performance has been weak for many years due to my incompetent previous collimation attempts.  The replacement of allen-bolts with Bob's Knobs last month has gotten my meade scope as collimated as it's ever been, so I think I've got a good chance during my next session to finally get some quality (for me) images out of the setup soon...

That's it for now.  I'll post some previous pictures from our Solar Eclipse trips, Venus Transit images, and the better of my images from the un-collimated equipment I'd been trying to tweak over the past few months.

Thanks for reading, and hope this blog is worthwhile.  I realize this may only be read by me, and in that case I hope it serves as a means to collect lessons-learned which I can use to build up my skills.

Cheers,
Haywood