We are novices and recently joined ( Oct 2003) the North Houston Astronomy (NHAC) club.
This site is really a documentation of our experiences in Astronomy. It contains a selection of our astrophotos, other pictures and information acquired during our learning curve. We try to document each of our major learnings. We hope that you enjoy it. Hopefully the photos will get better over time.

A typical small starter telescope. However, we got a lot of mileage from this telescope and we still have it. Now it is used primarily for Solar viewing. I completed nearly all of the Lunar Certificate and part of the Messier Certificate with this scope. Kelsey completed a large part of the Universe Sampler in this scope.

This was our first "advanced" scope purchase. It has the Celestron Advanced Series (CG-5) Mount with GoTo capability. We got this scope for both visual and photographic work. The OTA on this scope is better than average, but the mount is only fair. Visually, it does an excellent job and will track. However, it won't track accurately enough for photographic work longer than about 30 seconds. At some point, we plan to replace the mount with a higher quality tracking mount. It still does a good job overall.

This is our favorite "backyard" scope. The Dobs mount is very easy to work with and set-up is a snap. We use this primarily in the driveway; it is sitting on a roller platform. This scope has digital setting circles that work very well. Alignment is 2 minutes and it will routinely put any object within the FOV of a 25mm eyepiece. I also use this for Lunar photography.

We already had this camera for normal digital photography and just added astrophotography to its list of usage. At first, we just hand-held it up to the eyepiece ( bright objects only) for afocal shots. Then we got the Digi-T attachments for this camera ( www.scopetronix.com ). This camera works well for afocal shots, but it restricted to bright objects. Check out Kelsey's Solar shot and my Lunar shots with this camera.

Our primary deep space camera. We have just begun to use this camera and haven't mastered it yet. Only a few shots so far. Hopefully, more will come from this as we get deeper into astrophotography and acquire a bette tracking mount.