Astronomy and Astro Photography is one of my oldest hobbies: As a child, I loved reading books about astronomy and as soon as I was able to afford a telescope, I took all my savings to buy the back then best telescope possible – a catadioptric telescope with 1000mm focal length and a parallactic mount that could even be motorized. With that (and my father’s Nikon F2) I started taking my first pictures of the Moon and other night sky objects.
After finishing school, the hobby got somewhat forgotten but fast forwarding to 2013, I rediscovered my enthusiasm – and also hoped to inspire my 5yo daugther to get interested in astronomy & physics. But to me, this also meant I had to learn astro photography from scratch, again: No more analog film processing – now everything being digital, I learnt about stacking, HDR, and so on.
But I also had to learn, light pollution is now a major problem. In my backyard, where I wanted to observe the night sky, the street lights illuminate simply everything and the “security” lighting of the nabouring houses even added to that. So what to do? Either, I could quit this hobby (again) or, I needed to find another solution.
And I found: in 2014, I built a complete observatory on the rooftop of my house. Since then, I have been exploring and learning the secrets of digital astro photography.