They say Montana is Big Sky Country…in Nebraska, I think we have pretty Awesome Skies too!
This all started when I was a kid, laying on the roof of a pig shed on summer nights looking up at what I now know to be Bortle 2 skies. During the day, my brother and I would find animals in cloud shapes. At night, we’d connect the dots and find other creatures – some later turned out to be documented like the Big Dipper (aka Big Spoon to us), others were just our imagination running free.
In 1979, we had a solar eclipse that was about 80% total where I was in school. We had a fantastic art teacher who in planning for the solar eclipse, asked us to bring oatmeal boxes from home. Basically we made pinhole cameras and I still remember sitting on the sidewalk next to my grade school buddies, with the sky darkened trying to figure out how I was going to be able to see the sun without looking at it; and how an image that I could see was being made because light through a pin prick landed on a piece of photo reactive paper that we later developed like a photograph. That same day we made our way to the football field where the shop class kids in high school let us use their welding helmets and goggles to “see” the sun. I actually don’t remember the image, but I do remember the process and the eerie feeling that an eclipse, even a partial one at 80%, could provide.
Forward to 1986 and that was the year Halley’s comet visited. I basically missed most of the coverage because being in high school meant watching intently the NASA space shuttle Challenger mission to carry a teacher to space. And then sadly fixating for days on the mission exploding shortly after lift off. It took a few more years, like a decade, for me to get excited about seeing things in space again. Comet Hale Bopp visited us in 1997 and I watched news coverage and went out with binoculars to observe. I became hooked on an awesome sky for the 2nd time in my life. But like so many hobbies, life interrupted and became busy.
Around 1999, I had finished my masters degree and had some extra cash so I purchased my first telescope. It was a 6 inch Orion AstroView Newtonian reflector and I purchased the manual movement equatorial mount to follow objects in the sky. I had great fun looking at the moon, and finding Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Professional life tends to blend together but I was at a conference in Orlando and had secured tickets to visit Kennedy Space Center. Just a few days after arriving home from that trip, the STS-107 mission crew flying on the space shuttle Columbia exploded on re-entry. Later that year in 2003, I engaged friends in multiple mini-star parties, viewing Mars through the Newt when it was close to Earth. It was hard to keep the planet in view with a manual motion EQ mount and that became frustrating. But if one got Mars in the circle, you could easily make out the red planet’s polar ice caps. I bought an Orion Apex 127mm Maksutov-Cassegrain (Mak-Cass) scope around 2004 to get an even better view of the planets and quickly determined that having nearly double the focal length was even more frustrating trying to manually follow it’s apparent movement as the Earth spun. Life got busy again and time passed by, I still went out with binoculars but the setup sessions for the mount came few and far between.
Then in 2017, I met a friend (Sandhills SkyShed) who also shares an interest in our awesome sky. 2017 was the year of the Great American Eclipse, and I happen to live in the path of totality. We had an eclipse party, I shot some great pics, and had a blast. Sandhills SkyShed brought his gear and we projected the eclipse to a movie screen for an audience of about 75 people. I became totally hooked for the 3rd time. After that I dinked with astrophotography using a Canon Rebel T6i and a plain photo tripod. But quickly picked up on the fact that with the motion of the heavens, if I wanted to take some really good pics, I would need better gear.
In 2020, I purchased a used iOptron CEM40 and a used William Optics Zenithstar 103 from OPT, along with other assorted used gear off the Cloudy Night Classifieds. I caught comet Neowise with the DSLR and the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction on my Google Pixel XL. This year, in 2021, I purchased a new iOptron CEM26 mount, ZWO ASI224MC camera, ZWO ASI2600MC Pro camera, Radian Raptor 61 scope, and my first dedicated solar scope – a DayStar Scout. I’ll be attending my first official star party this August. I think this time, this fish has the hook set on this addiction for life.
By day, I’m an IT manager in a public library – so I definitely come by my self professed geekiness naturally.