My Blogs

3/9/2008 3:58:37 PM


Finally up.

3/9/2008 12:45:50 PM
after months of intention ive finally sat down to set up this site. procrastination...go figure.

for this initial entry i guess ill get the introductions and background info out of the way for those that dont know me. for those that do you can skip this as you probably already know more than you ever wanted to.

the basics: my name is Johnny. im 34yo. married for 11 years. i have 2 children; a 12yo girl and 10yo boy. i have 2 dogs. i live in nw florida. my other hobbies include reading and poker. ive always had an interest in asronomy, cosmology, and ancient history. these subjects have always fascinated me and growing up i would read as many books as i could get my hands on and still do.

i didnt point my first telescope at the sky until my family bought me a 60mm meade (walmart special) for fathers day in 2005. shortly thereafter i bought a celestron 127mm firstscope reflector. once i thoroughly whacked that one attempting to collimate it (the internal barlow lens made it hell for me) i picked up a 114mm reflector sold by meade through their closeout store. i soon mounted that ota on an eq3 mount and thats when observing really started getting good. wanting to shake things up a bit and try a new style of optics i bought an orion 120mm f8.3 refractor. i mounted it on the eq3 and it was serviceable, but before long i  realized i need to step up to something a little beefier.  i bought a used cg5 with a right ascension motor and i have been using that combo since last spring.

i do 99.9% of my observing from my back yard. i have fairly dark skies for a suburban setting. on good nights i can see the milky way and the brighter messier objects (m31, m44, m6 and 7 for ex.) can be seen naked eye. i have a moderate light dome to the east and north. the western skies are blocked by trees. the south offers the best conditions since the gulf of mexico is that way and theres no light pollution except for a few street lights. one good thing about the local conditions is i routinely have very good seeing. its actually rare to have a night of bad seeing thankfully.

for the first year and a half or so i was strictly a visual observer. then one fateful night i decided to hold my canon a60 up to the ep and snap off a few shots of the moon. being impressed with the results i soon tried taking some avi movies of jupiter and stacking the frames with registax. the final images were recognizable, and i was hooked. since i dont have a laptop, and really have no use for one, ive stuck mainly with afocal photography. i have upgraded to a canon a560 camera and use a universal digicam adapter to mount it to the ep. for deep space objects i use a gso 32mm plossl eye piece. for lunar and planetary i use a 4mm tmb. i do have a philips spc900 webcam ordered as of today, so image quality for lunar and planetary should improve.

well, thats about it as far as astronomy and Johnny goes. i hope you enjoy my rambling and modest pictures.