Ever since I was little kid I had always had an interest in astronomy. Sitting out my my granddad’s back garden with his telescope, looking up at the moon and the stars. I was hooked. I had all the books I could get my hands on and watched all the programs on TV to do with astronomy. Unlike most kids like this. I didn’t want to be an astronaut but instead i wanted to work in a famous observatory.
In my early teens when my granddad passed away, he left his small 50mm refactor to me, the one which I spent many nights gazing through when I was a little younger. I hadn’t gazed at the stars for a while from this point and I eagerly wanted to use my new telescope to do just that. But after a few observations I became disappointing, I was expecting to be able to see the colourful towering pillars of gases and dust that I had seen in books, and clustered of billions of stars with spiral patterns of the galaxies I had seen on TV. Even the faint fuzzy ball with blurry rings around it which was Saturn or Jupiter were underwhelming to me and I soon stopped observing. I didn’t have any clue about the difficulty even viewing any of these from earth, let alone knew that most the images I saw were many many hours of photographs which the eye would never see using massive telescopes that I would never have.
Over my teen years I was still extremely interested in astronomy, but rarely did I even go out and look at the starts until me and my dad together got a new telescope. A Skywatcher 130p Newtonian. It was a big scope to me and on what I thought to be an an impressive mount. A Eq-2. It was the first time I ever saw an actual nebular with my own eyes, the Orion Nebular, it was amazing to me at first but it was just a faint blue fuzz of light which could have been mistaken for a smear on the lens. Again I became underwhelmed and soon lost interest in observation again and still not understanding why I couldn’t see these bright colourful structures in my telescope which i had seen in my books.
Moving into my late teens I soon started to understand why I couldn’t see in the sky what I saw in the books this only disheartened me even more, I didn’t have the money to spend on such expensive kit. It wasn’t until my early – mid 20s when I got myself a Canon 600D DSLR for terrestrial photography I soon realised that I could use it to finally see what I’ve always wanted. I got myself a Celestron C130 Maksutov Cassegrain and a Celestron CG5-GT mount and started taking photos of the night sky and finally getting to see the reds and blues in the Orion nebular and spectacular views of the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. And then I got my first ever view of a galaxy, But this was very difficult to fine, was blurry with long star trails. So I did some proper research and soon found out I need to spend more money to get a guiding scope and camera and that the telescope was too powerful, so I soon saved up and got myself a guide scope along with a SkyWatcher 130PDS Imaging Newtonian and began imaging the sky. Finally I started getting the photos I always dreamed of. I was getting to see the patterns of faint blue of the seven sisters. Seeing the billions of stars making a purple disk of the Andromeda galaxy and the different clouds of dust in the numerous nebulae scattered across the sky.