Welcome to Jarek's Amateur Astronomy Site
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I have been interested in astronomy and astrophysics since my middle school days, but I wasn't observing anything until relatively recently, i.e. 2002. Observing supplements my "theoretical" interest in astronomy - it would not be so much interesting if I didn't know some about the things I see, and on the other hand seeing adds a "personal touch" to knowledge. As by profession I am a theoretician (computational biology at present), and I read about astronomy (and observing) more than I do observe (or image). You may want to check my book resources page to see interesting books I have read (no, I am not associated with Amazon in any way other than being a good long time customer).

My amateur astronomy journey started with a small 4.5" Dobsonian from Orion (SkyQuest 4.5), but morphed fast into a serious enterprise.  After approximately a year I added Celestron C9.25-SGT, then added 80mm piggyback refractor (C80ED) and I was quite happy until I got aperture fever again ... My thoughts slowly focused on the biggest of Celestron SCTs - the famous 14". That urge to have bigger and bigger and bigger telescope! I bet you know it very well :-). I had to buy 14" SCT, and so I did, and I am very happy with it. CGE1400 is a great scope, wonderful optics, excellent mount! It performs very well for visual, with good pointing accuracy. Many say that C14+C80ED would be too heavy for CGE mount for astrophotography, but for me it works very well in this aspect too. In order to have a reasonably sized and very portable telescope I also added 10" Dobsonian from Antares (bought off Astromart), while in the meantime I sold there C9.25-SGT ... On the other side Coronado PST opened a new area of Solar observing for me, it is a fantastic little scope.

I am interested in both visual observing as well as digital photography, for which I first acquired Meade's Deep Sky Imager (DSI). It is a nice little CCD camera, very easy to use. I used it for some time, but then I didn't have much time to pursue CCD starting in the Fall'05. It all changed in the Spring of 2007. My wife Ewa got Canon Digital Rebel XTi for Christmas 2006: she used it for daytime photography, I used it at night :-). Since then I upgraded to Hutech modified Canon 40D. I post my photos in the "Astrophotography" section, there are quite a few accumulated there already. For me both sides of the hobby are important, I like visual observing, but I also like photographing, and it used to be very difficult to decide what to do on any particular clear night. But it is not anymore ...

I was pretty lucky to live in a place where light pollution is not severe, even though my first house in Ithaca was relatively close to the city I was still able to observe from my backyard's deck, and on a good night limiting magnitude was around 5.5 (depending on where I looked, worst part low in the west was probably ~4.0). A big drawback of my backyard observing was my field of view - there were trees around, and my declination limit was about -18º (and I needed good timing to use this opening!). However it all changed for the better in the summer of 2008.  We moved to a new house, much farer from the center of Ithaca, where I built a small backyard observatory! This is the ultimate in amateur astronomy and my dreams come true. At my new house the limiting magnitude is 6.26 (21.27 mag/sq arc sec) and now my declination limit is around -32º across all southern horizon. My observatory houses two permanent scopes: my old C14 to be used for imaging and visual, and Orion 10" Newtonian (on CGE mount) to be used for imaging only. I have also added a strictly visual large aperture portable scope: Obsession 18" classic. Now I can carry out imaging and do visual observing at the same time the same night. Form me it is one of the best advantages of having an observatory. (BTW I don't think there are any disadvantages of having an observatory anyway :-) )

There are two local web resources I set up and maintain that may be of interest to you. The first one is a page with information about expected cloud coverage for Ithaca, NY (based on NOAA) with Sun and Moon data (from U.S. Naval Observatory). The second is an overlay of light pollution map on Virtual Earth covering Upstate NY and Northern Pennsylvania. This map is also available as a regular Live Maps collection and as my own Live Maps implementation.