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Michael A. Stecker
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My astronomical life started in 1997 with a simple Tasco reflector, a gift for my second son. He soon lost interest in the scope, so I tried it out and and began to explore the Moon and the Planets. Because of the need for higher magnification I soon upgraded to the Meade ETX90 which made for better planetary viewing. In 1998 I joined the local astronomy club and acquired a C11 on a G11 mount. Astro-related photographic film experiments failed, but in 1999 I successfully introduced a webcam for planetary imaging and motivated other colleagues of my club to do the same. My wife Roswitha supported my new hobby fascinated from the endless variety of objects to observe and to image. To escape the painful setup installation every night I built my own 3m observatory beside my house 25 km south of Graz during summer 2000 in a semi-rural environment (mag 5 sky typical). Another big step into deep sky astrophotography was the use of a digicam, first the Nikon CP995, then replacing it 2001 with the Canon D60 and 2002 with the Canon 10D. A MX7C was used for autoguiding. My second high quality scope was a 4” f/6.5 TMB APO refractor. Ironically most times I was guiding with the C11 and imaging with the 4” refractor. I accepted the lower cost and big chip size of the Canon D-SLR with reduced efficiency, as no reasonable priced CCD cameras were available up to 2003. To overcome the low quality of these raws I tried to compensate it by long multiple exposures and tricky Photoshop processing. By doing this I was pushing the limits of digicam imaging. At the beginning of the year 2004 SBIG released the STL-11000, the first full frame CCD camera and I got one of the first models. During the year 2004 I consequently explored mainly nebulas using the wide field of my TMB. Also this year my wife and I did our first trip to Namibia, using most of the nights to image many fascinating southern targets with the TMB and the STL on my mobile setup.
Intense E-mail communication with colleagues all over
the world pushed my experience in image acquisition and processing.
Another dream came true in early 2005
when after a
2 years wait my 16" Cassegrain from P. Keller was finished and
installed in my observatory. This
was a
big step forward and allowed for imaging objects
of various sizes in both medium
to high resolution. Because of the f/3 option of
my Cassegrain,
I tend to specialise in wide-field
images.
Additionally,
I am doing high resolution imaging using a firewire webcam
and my Cassegrain typically at f/20 for planets, Moon and Sun.
In
November 2005 I was invited to speak at
the Advanced Imaging
Conference in San Jose, California where
I spoke on imaging
with the STL-11000.
It was a great experience because I met many famous
astro-imagers in person and enjoyed talking directly with them the first
time.
Also in November 2005 I sold my 4”
TMB and bought a TEC-140 f/7 APO refractor to improve my mobile setup.
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