Equipment

I’ve owned more telescopes in my lifetime than I care to recall. I started with a small spotting scope that hooked me on astronomy with its bright, crisp views of our Moon. As an adult I returned to astronomy with the purchase of the original orange Celestron C-8 in the mid 80’s. I took my first lunar photographs with the C-8 using an Olympus camera and film. My first photographs were submitted to Astronomy magazine; to my surprise I had one published! I have been hooked on astrophotography ever since.

In search of more aperture, I went from the C-8 to a C-14 for a few years. Ultimately I wanted higher quality and I ended up with an excellent 16″ f5 Newtonian. I designed and built this telescope with two interchangeable secondary mirrors. The larger secondary was setup for deep sky imaging and the smaller secondary (to lower the effects of diffraction) was used for planetary imaging. This setup was my primary imaging ‘go-to’ telescope for over a decade. (The 16″ can be seen in the B&W 1996 background image above.) Everything was housed in a roll-off roof observatory in Lima, New York.