Welcome Back

G’day and welcome back, I hope you’ve had clear skies! Today I thought I talk about some of my journey into astronomy and astrophotography, I suspect that some people may have similar journey’s, but others will differ wildly.

How it all started

It all started when I was in early high school thinking about existence and how everything came to be, I thought about the god or gods that may have created all things, or if things ‘just were’ either through a multiverse or if it was by some other means, just after starting to wonder this, we started to study space and physics in more detail.

The study into space and physics really helped me to understand some of the basic principals, history and ideologies around how our universe worked, lucky for me (unlucky for my school study) was that I loved to learn more and dig into more details. One of these was learning more about space, what was in it finding photos that the Hubble scope had taken and that really triggered me to want to look at it with my own eyes one day. At that point telescopes were well out of financial reach and school kept me busy, which meant that I lost focus on wanting to look into, it wasn’t until well into my 20s that space and science started to come knocking.

It all started (again) when I got my first DSLR in 2012, a Canon 600D, I still have it today and is the camera I used for the image above! I started doing landscape photography and eventually progressed around 2016 into night photography as well, this is when I started to notice long exposure photos would make it easier to see the milky way, it reignited my interest.

How it’s been going

Since then, I’ve chased the goal of being able to take a photo of the Great Orion nebula (M42), after many hours (read weeks) of research into equipment where I could take something decent, but not spend all the money in the world, I wound up with a William Optics Z73 scope, Sky-Watcher HEQ5-Pro and… my trusty DSLR!

Now What?

After the excitement of actually being able to capture, process and see something that is light years across, beautiful and fulfilled a nearly two decades old dream of owing a telescope, one I thought would never come to pass, what now? Where do I go from here? It felt like catching a car a dog might have been chasing for so long… Well, that’s where the global community comes in, people who I’ve never met have inadvertently encouraged me with ideas, goals and improvements (I’ll provide those resources in a later post).

I’ve completed a graduate certificate specialising in astronomy to understand more about what I’m taking photo’s of, I’ve taken up electronics, another hobby I’ve been interested in to create supporting items for my astrophotography.

Finally I started this site to do two things, document my journey so I can look back on what I’ve done (I don’t always have a great memory) and give back some of the knowledge I’ve gathered that has helped me start and continue.

What about you?

I wonder if you’ve had a similar journey? Considered doing astrophotography, but not sure where to start? I’d love to hear.