Not too long ago (sometime in mid 2001), I started getting really interested in astronomy. Not because astronomy itself is cool, but rather because I kept seeing all these really amazing photographs that amateur astronomers had taken through their telescopes, and I just thought, "WOW, what a GREAT way to do something even more exciting with my photography!" (Photography is, of course, another one of my very favorite hobbies.) So, I started dreaming about how great it would be to be able to take those kinds of photos myself.
Of course, as I started looking more and more into astronomy, what I discovered was that it was a really interesting hobby too! So I have pretty much been consumed by it. Astronomy has two major drawbacks. One is that you can pretty much only do it at night, and I don't get enough sleep as it is. The other problem is that it can be a very EXPENSIVE hobby. It doesn't have to be an expensive hobby if you have the time and the dedication to build your own equipment, but for us people with too little time to do everything anyways, it is often easier to just buy the computer controlled, automatic everything, show me the sky telescope. Not that it doesn't still take a lot of skill to use your tools well, but it sure does make things a lot easier!
Like I said, this is the big reason why I got into astronomy in the first place! Astronomy just isn't cool if you can't share it with other people, and photos are the second best way, after letting them look through your telescope.
Go here to see some of the photos I have taken so far, and to see some of the lessons I've learned from my experiences.
I have begun making some notes about the equipment that I have used, and what I liked and hated about using it. This section has some of this information available for your perusal. If you have any questions or suggestions or complaints, please let me know!
I have a few goals for my astronomy hobby, since if I didn't have any focus I would probably lose interest really quickly. Fortunately, there are a lot of really interesting things to see, and even after you've seen something once, something new and exciting might happen with it, like an occultation, or you see moons you haven't seen before, or you get a view of a galaxy that is clearer than anything you've seen before through your telescope. The variety is ceaseless! Astrophotography helps a lot too, because I've decided to set myself a few goals:
I HATE COMETS. Well, I don't really hate them, but they really tick me off sometimes because I am so bad at finding them!!! It's something I need to work on. They are either close to the horizon where I can't see them from my neighborhood, or they are dim and I can't find them anyways. One of these days I need to get over my comet-problem. Maybe that will become a goal, to get a good photo of a comet.