Welkom!

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My telescope

It took me long enough
I've been interested in astronomy way longer than I've had a telescope. Why? Because I have lived in the most light poluted areas of the world: the western part of the Netherlands. Furthermore I live in a city. That basically means: forget seeing nebulas, galaxies or even our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Still on the table: the Moon, planets and some star clusters.

In 2007 a collegue advised me to buy a telescope anyway. A good, but cheap one. If you're willing to spend a couple of hundreds of euros, you can't go wrong with a Dobson telescope from a respectable astronomy site (recommended sites: ASTOptics, Ganymedes, Teleskop Express and Robtics (I sometimes hear people complain about that last one. I didn't have any problems with them). But don't forget you also need an array of eye pieces and good ones don't come that cheap either.

I don't want to make this too much into a telescope buying advice site here. After all there are enough other sites that do that. But don't forget that when you want to buy a Dobson telescope (or any other Newtonian), you need to learn a skill called collimation. If I've learned anything at star parties, is that you're doing it wrong. And those handy laser devices are not good enough. As a beginner, you might buy one anyway. You've got to start somewhere, right? It's better than a completely blurry view.

My Celestron 9.25 with CGEM mount
In 2015 I decided I wanted to upgrade to a telescope with a motorized mount. And so I bought a Celestron 9.25 (inch) with a CGEM mount.

My Celestron 9.25 telescope on CGEM mount.

And in this video I present it to you:



Astronomy without a telescope
For long exposure shots of the nightsky I have my camera, the Canon EOS 60D. I especially selected this camera back in 2011 on the ability to make photo's with exposures longer than a handful of seconds and to make dark photo's with little noise.

Orion, taken from my balcony, with an exposuretime of 15 seconds.

Pictures and text - Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, 2008