Recent Activities:

I am currently involved in an ambitious project:  creating a web page for astro-imaging from Carbon County, Utah.   My plan is to photograph and post images of most Messier objects and many others  from my back yard, using my new observatory.

The equipment I have available is:  A Celestron C-14 telescope, an SBIG ST-8 CCD camera, A Nikon D-100 camera body, and a series of Nikkor lenses, along with an adapter to use the S-T8 camera with them.   I plan to re-take many of the pictures I took previously with an SBIG 237 camera and an SBIG 402 camera, as well as imaging new objects I have not previously photographed. It will be interesting to compare the new series of CCD images with those I have taken with the older equipment, especially those taken with my C-5 telescope and from the urban location where I used to live:    The link which contains the most recent images is:     21 century images

While this link currently still contains a number of older images taken with previous equipment, over time, it will gradually change over to include all or nearly all photos imaged with the new ST-8 camera and the Nikon D-100. However, I plan to keep a number of these older images on this site for the purposes of comparison. Some of these will appear on the new pages below the newest images but others will be maintained on older pages at the following links:     C-5, Nikon lens, and 237 images

Obviously, to an experienced astrophotographer, nearly all of my older images will appear crude and poorly accomplished.   But the truth is that I have been and still am quite pleased with the results of my imaging with this older, less expensive, and by today's standards, quite primitive equipment, especially since I suffered the handicap of having to photograph through the turbulent and light polluted skies of Salt lake City.   

I must confess that I envy my colleagues who have the funds to acquire and use the very best equipment such as the larger SBIG cameras and the finest mountings. But the truth is that I am far from experienced enough to have utilized the equipment I now own to the best advantage. I can only hope that over time, I will learn to do a better job of imaging and processing to produce the best possible results available to me.