Home»Astrophotography

My son and I were squinting though the eyepiece of my Meade Model 277 60mm telescope in the late summer of 2008 at Jupiter. We could see the moons, and sort of make out the equatorial bands. I bought this "Cometseeker" scope about 1986, just before Halley made it's epic comeback.

Anyway, looking at Jupiter in this small scope, my son wondered out loud what it would look like through a LARGE telescope. We turned to each other and smiled . . . what indeed!

So in September of 2008, I bought a larger telescope, another Meade, this time a Schmidt-Cassegrain with an aperture of 200mm (8 inches). Not a huge telescope by any means, but a vast improvement in light gathering, and now with a computer controller than can slew the telescope in seconds to any of thousands of objects.

The view is much better, but . . . nothing compared to photographs I had seen. Brilliant stars, but very faint fuzzy other things. I tried attaching a camera to the back of the scope, and instantly realized how incredibly difficult and therefore how completely addicting astrophotography can be.