G'day
I am an amateur astronomer and began my astronomical hobby in 1982. It started when my wife, Janet, and I were on a camping trip to Hill End
(an old gold mining town in central NSW). Standing around the camp fire, I felt like a couple of beers to take my mind off how cold it was.
As I tilted my head back to take a sip of beer, I noticed how many stars were in that clear country sky. Janet suggested buying a telescope
to get a better look at them, so I did, and that started my journey off this planet... metaphorically speaking of course.
Telescopes
At first, I knew very little about astronomy, I did a bit of research and decided on a good quality, small telescope to start. I bought a 60
mm refractor from Astro-Optics in Sydney. This scope was good for
the moon and planets but it didn't show the faint "fuzzies" as well as I wanted. The aperture bug took its first bite. A few
months later I was back to Astro-Optics for an upgrade to a 15 cm Newtonian reflector which
revealed a whole new universe of objects. After 12 months, aperture fever made me buy the next scope, an Astro-Optics 25cm
reflector . The final jump (to date) in aperture size was in 1991 to a homemade 31.5cm
scope .
Farm
Our family and I bought a 25 acre property near a landmark called Frog Rock . This is located
about 25 kilometres north-east of Mudgee , New South Wales, Australia.
The night sky here is often clear and always very dark. I wanted others to share in the sights I was seeing, so I started taking photographs
of the objects in the sky.
Photography
My interest in astronomy now covers all topics but my main one has become astrophotography. I have enjoyed recording images of many well
known and some not so well known deep sky objects that are found predominately in the southern skies. Between 1984 and 1992, most of the
deep sky images on this website were taken with film, with only miscellaneous targets of opportunity since then (comets etc). I had very
little control over how the colour prints turned out in the past but since computers, scanners and software have improved, I can now process
them to a much more consistent finish with removal of vignetting, unsharp masking, stacking of multiple images and colour adjustment.
As of May 2006 I have started using a video CCD camera for imaging. It has solved the main problems I had using film, such as hit and
(more often) miss focusing, precise guiding and film and processing costs. All the techniques I learned from processing film images are
being put to good use getting the most from these video images.
I have won 2 awards for my photographs,
overall winner of the 1988 Skywatch Bi-centennial Astrophotogaphic Competition
with an image of Messier 42/43/NGC 1977 (also 3rd prize for an image of NGC 6559 complex).
I received an honorable mention at the 2005 Parkes AstroFest David Malin Awards for my 20 year
sequence of the proper motion of Proxima Centauri .
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Image taken at 2005 CWAS AstroFest held at Parkes NSW.
Photo Copyright: John Sarkissian |
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