About this log
I’ve been looking up since I was a kid, long before I understood what any of it meant. Planets first, probably, then the slower realization that a lot of the sky isn’t nearby at all. My degree in astrophysics didn’t start that interest, but it gave it shape: it’s where “I like space” turned into a real pull toward deep space specifically, nebulae, galaxies, the things too faint and too far to just glance at and understand.
Astrophotography turned out to be the natural extension of that. Each image here is built the same way: many short exposures of the same patch of sky, stacked and calibrated to pull a signal out of noise that would otherwise be invisible from Bortle 4 location. It’s less like taking a picture and more like running a long, patient experiment where the outcome happens to be beautiful.
I started imaging in 2017, with Orion SpaceProbe newtonian, mostly because of the solar eclipse that year, along with a lovely (and not so great) image I got of Saturn. However, this would be put on hold for almost 10 years until 2026, where I would buy the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini smart telescope, that way I could get back into the hobby. It was not long before I purchased my first mobile rig (which is listed below).
What I’m shooting with now
Field Notes, the writing section of this site, is where I go into more detail on individual images — what the raw data looked like, what went wrong, what I’d change. Consider it the lab notebook version of the gallery.