Dave Wallace's Adventures in Astronomy

And I hadn't even planned to do astronomy! I bought the OTA as an "ETX90 Spotting Scope", intending to use it as a long telephoto lens on my camera for the purposes of doing nature photography. But I made the mistake of pointing it at the night sky one summer evening. First light was Albireo and I was hooked on this hobby.

This page is a running log of my observations and experimentation in mount design and construction and astrophotography. New! I'm also providing software tools for astronomy which I have written (as I get them into a state where I feel they work properly). These programs will be published, along with their Visual C++ source code, as freeware.

Note: all of the pictures in the log entries below are links to larger pictures. If you want to see more, just click on the image.

There are several sites on the web that I've found helpful while trying to use this OTA for astronomy. Foremost is Mike Weasner's Mighty ETX Site . Everything I know about the ETX and most of what I know about astronomy came from reading the wealth of information there or from chasing links from that site to others.

There is an excellent free planetarium program for the PC. It's called Cartes du Ciel (French for "Sky maps"). Anyone with a small to medium-sized telescope should invest some time in working with this program. It's software written by someone who obviously knew both how to write a good progam and what the user community he was writing for needed it to do. The English-language page for it is here .