Schlatter Family Site

My
Amateur Astronomy
Page

For years, now and then at night I would stop and gaze at the stars.  As a Boy Scout, I earned the astronomy merit badge.  When I read in the paper an announcement about a celestial event, I tried to watch it with binoculars.  I could identify Polaris -- the North Star -- the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, and that's it.   In early 2002 I decided to look into amateur astronomy as a hobby.  Of course, with the hobby of amateur radio, and an old VW Beetle that I fiddle with to keep it running, I really needed another hobby -- but what the heck.

This page and the pages linked to it are my experiences with my new hobby of amateur astronomy.

Table of Contents

This is a list of contents of my amateur astronomy pages.  I hope you find something useful here.

•  Getting Started

• My telescopes

• My eyepieces

• Astrophotography -- taking photographs through the telescope

• Book recommendations

• Tricks I learned while collimating my Dobsonian-mounted reflector (Orion XT-8)

• A few words about binoculars

• How to build an adjustable observing chair (the Denver Chair)

• Photos taken through my telescope using a simple digital camera.

• More to come -- please come back and visit

HELP!!

If you are familiar with operation of the Meade LPI and Autostar Suite image processing, please look at this page and make suggestions.   Thanks.

First LPI Image

Here is my first successful image using the Meade LPI.