Last updated on January 3rd, 2021 at 08:02 pm

My name is Jason and I enjoy observing and photographing the night sky as an amateur backyard astronomer and astrophotographer. I have been practicing and learning since June of 2019.

I live in Florida with my wife Kelly, two kiddos, and a German Short Haired/Labrador Retriever, Skippy. We live in a Bortle Class 6 area, not the greatest location for astrophotography, but still manage to collect some pretty incredible images of our night sky.

It started one night when my wife mentioned Jupiter was going to be in conjunction in the Florida sky in June 2019. I ended buying a telescope that night on Amazon which was a total impulse buy and lack of research started me down a path of multiple telescopes. But ultimately got hooked on looking at the stars.

That first telescope was a Celestron – PowerSeeker 127EQ Telescope. We got some amazing views of the planets on those first nights but when I started to understand collimation and alignment this scope disappointed. We wanted to see crisp and contrasty images allowing us to make out the Great Red Spot on Jupiter and rings on Saturn, it turns out this was my first mistake. The primary mirror was spherical and created the need for a special lens to properly focus the image in the eyepiece.

This also creates some special challenges when trying to collimate the primary mirror. Through other research I came across the AWB OneSky telescope.

This telescope had a retracting truss so it was compact and easy to move around. The primary mirror was parabolic so aligning this bad boy was painless. The OneSky was $199 vs the Celestron being about $150 the extra $50 bucks is well worth it.

This is to this day still my favorite and most used component when looking at the stars and planets with my wife. We spent quite a few nights out gazing at Jupiter and Saturn. Our neighbors enjoy stopping by. Something about seeing the rings on Saturn and the Red Spot on Jupiter you just have to see with your own eyes.

The next piece of equipment came the AZ-GTi goto mount which turned those long nights trying to find objects into a quick point and click search on my phone. This sort of “cheating” allowed us to view so much more every night and we could stop the constant “it’s gone again” frustration of star gazing.

Then came the eyepiece obsession to get every little piece of clarity from this scope and desire for the highest quality optics. My preference are the TelVue Radians for there long eye relief and availability on Astromart as used eyepieces.

Reading many late nights on CloudyNights I was intrigued by the guys taking pictures and getting amazing views of Deep Sky objects right from their own backyards. This can be an extremely expensive hobby and wasn’t quite sure it was for me so I focused on a simple integrated setup that would not break the bank. I tried to reuse as much of my telescope gazing equipment as I could and bought used equipment on eBay and Astromart when possible to try out Astrophotography.

I started shooting with with an old IR modified Canon DSLR XSi Rebel ($150) and a RedCat 51 APO ($750). I have added a secondary glide CMOS camera integrated with a Raspberry Pi4 to get those longer exposures.

I hope to share my lessons learned to hopefully inspire and help those new to the hobby so they can experience the wonders of the night sky. I am by no means an expert and have a lot to learn still. I built this Blog to track my progress over time hopefully help others get interested in the hobby.

My image collection equipment is centered around kStars, EKOS, and INDI and I use PixInsight and Topaz Labs Image Processing software to pull the data out of data to create the images on this website.