As to me: I've loved astronomy for a looong time. Even made it my profession - for some limited time (incl 2yrs in the UK). But earning a living with it, long-term, was much too hard. Much easier to work in software industries, I can tell. So with some twist of attitude, I am back to doing it as an ambitious hobby nowadays - though, for sure, very much like everybody else here.
Around 1975, started off with a real horrible 2" f/18 refractor (eyepieces even more horrible). Bravely, I was observing M51 from a town home with it, and hunting Ceres using Becvar's Atlas Coeli 1950.0 or sketching the Theophilius group on the moon, observed comet West in 1976 (was it?), of course. Joined a 2200km bus trip to southern spain to see/photograph (on Kodak 103a-O film) a comparably tiny comet Halley - these sort of things...
Around 1987 - slight increase of aperture - observing around the world with up to 3.5m class telescopes, CCDs + (a ton of) spectrograph attached, never LOOKING thru of course - what a pity! :-) Exiting the game 1996 for a proper job.
Since 2007 - major slide in aperture again, OMG - I use a pure manual 20" f/4 dobson with Naglers, under skies up to 21.4...6mag/sq.arcsec (after a 1-3hours drive). Galaxies is my main 'business', but basically I'm into everything as long as it's interesting, well yes, to me.
My website eyes4skies.de is in German - really sorry for this ! (pls use 'electric' translators, maybe I'll find time for proper translations). Recently, upgraded the site to a new major (v2) version (old v1 links remain working). Major assets are basically:
(1) obs reports since 2007
(2) xref page interlinking back/forth my (personal) object cat & my obs reports. This is a (software-generated) tool for myself really. I use it (i) obs time (w/notebook next to the scope, interlinkage w/GUIDE 9.1) AND (ii) for 'documentation' (myself + the web). A list of TBO='to be observed' objects, though - well, that's still an anxiously kept secret :-)
Too much said anyway, actually I am looking forward to discussing with you.
And, of course, grateful to benefit from your huge pool of joint experience. Wow !
Kind regards, hopefully clear skies soon,
Peter
PS: An english language resource on my site is a report from the 2006 Solar Eclipse in Turkey.
However better don't navigate around from there (it's deep in my old v1 HTML) better use the main entry (v2) thereafter, sorry for this.
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Last edited by petersurma; May 15th, 2023 at 08:44 PM.
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